One by one, he sends them out into the park with nothing but a flashlight, a radio, and their courage.
The room clears, is all but empty, when Nuri moves to Bell’s side, opening her mouth to speak. He holds up a hand, indicates Norman Struss, still manning the Spartan II, still trying to gauge the machine’s potential duplicity; Heather Heoi at the network station, on the coms; and finally Neal Bailey, watching the surveillance monitors. All of them are grim, all of them focused on their work, but Bell can see the beads of sweat shining on Struss’s balding head, and he knows how frightened all of them must be. He cannot fault them for that.
“Right, get outside, help with the evac,” Bell tells them.
The Spartan begins bleating once more, and Struss quickly silences it with two keystrokes. The man’s shoulders slump, then rise once more, and when he turns in his seat, the expression he’s wearing is both apologetic and somehow resolved. Bailey refuses to glance away from the monitors, and Heoi is looking at him almost sadly.
“Someone’s got to babysit this thing,” Norman Struss says. “Someone has to wait for the diagnostic to come back.”
“I’ve got a job to do,” Bailey says simply.
Heoi nods slightly.
“Doesn’t have to be you guys. Grab a radio and get outside, help with the front gate.”
“I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Mr. Bell,” Bailey says. “But this was my job today. Wouldn’t be right for me to leave another to do it. You need eyes here, anyway, someone to check and make sure everything gets cleared out.”
“I’ll take it,” Nuri says.
“Not your job, either, Miss Nuri.”
Bell is scanning the monitor banks, the surveillance video. A time stamp in the upper corner of one of the screens tells him it’s been all of five and a half minutes since Nuri fetched him from his office. The evacuation is already in progress, people moving en masse, and he can see it on the screens. There’s a Hendar leading a young man by the hand, one of the concession Friends waving the glow sticks he sells above his head as he leads a cluster of confused and anxious parents with their children. He’s seeing all this, but Bell is not seeing panic, and that’s maybe the best he can hope for.
He is also not seeing any sign of the group from Hollyoakes school. If they’d done as suggested, they should be on the north side of the park, guided to either the northwest or northeast service exits, and out into the employee lots. Further along the bank of screens, he can see a view of the gates in question, visitors flooding through them. In the northeast lot, one of the first responder teams has already arrived, a fire engine and a group of what looks to be six men suiting up for hazmat work, white jumpsuits and gas masks.
He still doesn’t see Athena, still doesn’t see Amy.
And he still can’t shake the feeling that something about this isn’t right, isn’t what it seems at all.
Norman Struss, Heather Heoi, and Neal Bailey are all looking at him.
“Second it comes back, you contact me,” Bell says to Struss.
“Second it comes back, you’ll know,” Struss says.
They’re coming off the stairs and into the fake police station, finding it deserted, hearing the muffled noise from the foot traffic outside, when Nuri says, “What’re we doing?”
Bell has his cell phone out, the real one, the secured one, not the office one. Presses it to his ear, ignoring Nuri, listening as it rings once, twice, is halfway through its third, when Amy picks up. There’s ambient noise over the line immediately, and he can hear someone shouting for people to stay calm, to follow him.
“Jad?” Amy sounds calm, if a little breathless. “Jad, what the hell is going on?”
“The park is being evacuated. Do you have Athena with you?”
“What?” The noise over the line swells, a background of multiple voices, the reverb of Porter on the PA. “We’re-hold on-we’re being evacuated.”
“Is everyone with you? You have everyone with you?”
“Yes. We’re with that girl, the one you got for us. She’s leading us out. There are park people everywhere.”
“She’ll get you out, just follow her directions. I’ll be in touch.”
“Jad? What’s going on?”
“I’ll call you later.”
“This is why you didn’t want us coming, isn’t it? This is-”
Bell hangs up, hits another button, raises the phone again. Nuri has moved away, she’s now standing by the double doors, looking out as she speaks on her own phone. She glances his way, and from her look Bell has a good idea just who it is she’s talking to, and maybe even what he’s telling her.
“Chain, Warlock. Sitrep.”
“Assisting southwest evac. You inviting me to this dance or am I going stag?”
“It’s not that you don’t look pretty in a dress,” Bell says. He’s moved closer to Nuri, now lowering her phone. Bell looks out the windows of the double doors, and the mass of people beyond is like a moving wall of flesh and anxiety. A man passes, pushing a stroller, wife with diaper bag right behind, pulling a little boy along by his hand. The boy is in tears, dragging a stuffed Rascal doll by its tail. As he watches, someone steps on the monkey, the boy losing his grip. He wails in protest, but his parents don’t stop.
“What we got?”
“Something in the air.”
“I need to hold my breath?”
“Too late for that.”
Nuri makes a noise, shakes her head. Bell ignores her.
“Am I coming to you or you coming to me?”
“Neither,” Bell says. “Heading for the Keep.”
“You’re bringing the Angel?”
“Negative.”
“Roger that,” says Chain, and the line goes dead.
“That was some mighty macho bullshit,” Nuri says. “You want to tell me what you’re thinking?”
Bell tucks his phone away. “I’m thinking that if someone had aerosolized botulinum you or I or someone we know would’ve heard about it. I’m thinking if someone has done it, we’re all dead anyway. I’m thinking it’s a hell of a good way to get a park all to yourself, and I’m thinking that I’ve never seen a dispersal pattern that uniform in twenty years of looking at worst-case scenarios.”
“Funny.”
“Funny?”
“I was thinking the same thing. Minus the twenty years part.”
“Good, then you’ll love the next bit. Get back into the command post and keep an eye on things.”
Her jaw tightens. “I’m coming with you.”
“That’s a negative. Real or not, there’s someone on the inside, someone who planted the botulinum or mind-fucked the Spartan. If that someone is upstairs right now, they have access to all our intel, our coms, our eyes, and all of it is compromised. I need someone I trust upstairs, and Chain’s not here, so I’m stuck with you.”
“Those aren’t my orders.”
“They are now, Angel. What’s the word of the day?”
Her eyes are more brown than hazel in this light, and anger flashes in them. “The word of the day is ‘buzzsaw.’ You don’t trust me?”
“The word of the day is ‘buzzsaw,’” Bell agrees. “I’ve got mission coms in my office, in the desk, middle left, back. You get a chance, plug in. Chain or I will contact as soon as we’re on the net.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Bell pushes on the doors, feels the wash of heat, the sunlight, the noise of the evacuating park.
“Of course I don’t trust you,” Bell says. “You’re CIA.”
Then he wades into madness.
Chapter Eleven
Athena doesn’t like most hearing people.
They’re too much trouble, and they don’t get it, and pretty much all of them have no idea how to treat the deaf, anyway. Some of them freeze up and some of them just pretend there’s nothing different and sometimes, some of them, they act like it’s contagious or something. Like they can somehow catch deaf, like Athena can pass it on, which would be a trick and a half, especially because she doesn’t know how or why she lost her hearing, can’t remember if she really ever had it, and nobody else does, either. That’s not uncommon, Mom told her, the same time she told her that something like 90 percent of all deaf kids are born to hearing parents.