Because fifteen minutes later, as we crossed back into Kenya, it got worse again, when the sat call came through.
“We’re diverting you, Joe,” the admiral told us. “The State Department long-range Gulf Stream will meet you at Moi, in Nairobi. Those photos were awful.”
“It’s in Israel?” I asked, remembering the words I’d heard before, about Galilee, from the Situation Room. “It’s spread? It’s out already?”
There was shocked silence from the line, and I thought I felt raw emotion over space, bouncing up from the capital, gliding past burnt-up stars, directed back toward our pitching plane. “Israel, Joe? Why did you ask about Israel?”
“Because we heard you over the line earlier when you said there was a problem in Galilee.”
The admiral said quietly, “The audio was on?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Christ, those technical guys! Well, you’re right, Joe. It is in Galilee. You heard correctly. But not Galilee, Israel. Come home. It’s in Galilee, Nevada,” he said. “By the way, how are you two feeling?”
“Us?” said Eddie.
“Any tingling in your fingers?” the admiral asked, sounding concerned.
FOUR
The animals went crazy when Harlan turned on the light, emitting high-pitched cries of panic, clawing up against their wire mesh cages, bumping into each other in terror, staring out at him with tiny glazed eyes. He tried to soothe away their fear as they skittered and screamed. Normally, when calm, they sounded like cooing babies. Now they sounded like something from another world.
— Shhh. Shhh. I’m not going to hurt you.
It didn’t work, though. They recognized him, or rather, anything with two legs meant trouble, and they understood in the recesses of their primitive neuron passageways that even if they escaped pain at this particular moment, nothing good would come from association with him. Those things in the cages had brains the size of walnuts, DNA fifty million years old. Any analytical effort of which the smartest one — the Einstein of these creatures — might be capable might, at best, equal the thought power of a lumbering rhinoceros. They couldn’t add one plus one. The concept of “tomorrow” was beyond them. They’d stare at the red telephone as if it were a rock. But when it came to pain, they knew they were in trouble and their cage floors were creamy masses of piss and shit and emitted an acidic odor that took him back to the swamps where he’d grown up, hunted alligators and feral hogs, learned the truth about pain, trust, and the nature of life. It seemed like ten thousand years ago. He was forty-nine.
— Calm down, you little guys!
This time of night, 12 A.M., he was alone in the big lab two stories beneath the ground, the only one permitted access. Red light on. Air control system humming over the whimpering noises. Satellite shots of Jerusalem blown up on the walls; and close-ups from the old walled city; a narrow footpath, Via Dolorosa, “the way of suffering,” where Jesus walked to his crucifixion; the golden Dome of the Rock, from where Mohammed ascended on his white steed Baraq to heaven, to converse with God. And only a few hundred yards away, the site of Solomon’s Temple, where the Ark of the Covenant, given to Moses, came to rest for the Jews.
One square mile, Harlan thought, filled with joy. Remove that mile of earth, and two thousand years of human history — its crossroads, its major figures, its legends and lies and consequences — would be different. Nothing… not countries, not customs, not even science and aspiration would be the same.
Back to work.
Abutting the corner dissection area was a holding cell, now empty, and a top-of-the-line Bosch steel freezer, which required a four-digit combination to enter. He walked in and the cold hit him. He felt himself being watched on closed circuit feed by the night duty guards in the computer center, where the tech team sent out tweets, feeds, e-mails, and alerts. It was twenty-five degrees in here. His breath frosted as he stamped to keep warm, scanned the racks of medicines and blood and vials containing ground-up bits of animal intestine, brain, arterial scrapings. Other shelves were piled with supply cartons, blue stickers for stuff to be donated, yellow for vital, purple for transport over the coming weeks.
— Ah, there you are!
He took five small stoppered glass bottles filled with fluid the color of ten-year-old Dewar’s Scotch, his father’s old preferred drink, rocket fuel for paternal emotion at 2 A.M. From a cardboard box he removed twenty-one clean, freshly wrapped syringes in crinkly cellophane. He arranged the bottles on a silver tray in two circles, outer bottles for newbies, inner for everyone else. He was glad to leave the freezer, because he had always hated cold, even growing up. Unfortunately his orders had taken him here, to a cold place.
Now he stopped as a new sound hit him. A harsh ringing from the red phone on the computer table, amid the open, glowing Dells. All other phones were black.
It’s him, Harlan thought.
He broke out in a sweat. He did not want to pick up the phone. His happiness had evaporated. Everyone fears something and Harlan was terrified of the thing on the other end of the phone. But he answered and heard the dreaded voice, rumbly, a master’s voice, soft as static, a voice that sounded merely curious on the surface but held — he knew from experience — a vast torment beneath.
“Any news from Africa, Harlan?”
“Not yet but any minute. I’m sure of it.”
“You told me — ASSURED me — that you’d arrange things so it looks like everything started in Africa.”
“I did. I did. I swear it. It will!”
“You know what your problem is, Harlan? You’re too nice. Too easy on your people. You haven’t pushed your message with them. I’m disappointed in you.”
“My people will come through. I promise.”
“No one is sure of the future.”
“I didn’t make a mistake.”
A pause, a long pause, and Harlan felt his pulse thicken in his throat. He smelled sour sweat. Then the voice said, quite mildly, “I hope so, Harlan.”
The connection went dead. He heard the buzzing on the line as accusation. The headache began as a small pressure in his temples. The sweat rolled from his armpits down his rib cage and collected by his belly, above his belt. He told himself to calm down, that the void of news was a glitch. Satellite delay. It had to be. Hell, Somalia was a primitive hell. You couldn’t expect information to leach out of there with the same speed at which it traveled everywhere else in the modern world.
He spoke to himself out loud, to calm himself.
“Keep to the schedule. You have a job to do right now. You need to finish by one A.M.! You need to keep to the plan.”
A twelve-foot-long staircase brought him topside, through the well-lit gouged-out rock tunnel and into the farmhouse, 165 years old… stone foundation, Cold War — era overstuffed furniture, granite fireplace, and low, heavily beamed ceilings for tough hill winters. The house was deserted except for him. He was the only one permitted inside between midnight and 6 A.M. He walked out onto the big wooden porch, away from the inside cameras, but in full view of the ones in the moosewood maples, oak, pine, and black birch trees. The men in the guard shack would be watching. They’d see a white man who had lost little to middle age except hair, a lean, spry figure, slightly taller than average, fringe bald at the top, with close-shorn sideburns, well trimmed and flared at the bottom, and a ruddy, open face that was slightly askew in a way that made him seem likable. His aura of knowledge and forgiveness marked him as special. An uncle. A beloved teacher.