Just as they approached the base, the phone trilled. It was Burke calling from the White House, where he was getting out of a meeting.
Burke said crisply, “It’s in South Carolina.”
“Where?” She felt sick.
“Charleston. A seventy-two-year-old retired ticket taker on the Long Island Railroad came into Grand Strand Medical Center last night. He and his wife both show the marker. Ray Havlicek has agents at their retirement community, going condo to condo, seeing if anyone else is sick.” Burke sighed. “Five hundred retirees in that place, and half of them together in a dining room every day.”
“Has the couple been in Nevada or Africa?”
“They visited a grandson in Galilee last week.”
“Are they quarantined?”
A sigh. “Now? Yes. But four hours went by before we learned they were there. And they sat in the waiting room for an hour before going in. Around other people.”
The car passed into the base, past guards, barracks, lawns, runways. Up in the blue sky, Chris caught a glimpse of silver, something small and fast, angling down. She checked her watch. This might be Rush. She was unclear which emotion was stronger, the catch in her throat at his arrival, or the constriction brought on by Burke’s news.
Chris said, “It’s a mistake not to announce it.”
“Not our choice. The President knows he needs to get in front of it. But he’s figuring out what to say. We hope we’ll know more by tonight that will help him. Havlicek’s trying to track down any other visitors to Galilee.”
She sat, stunned, looking out at the bright sun, the passing cars, the incoming plane, normalcy.
Burke said, “Meanwhile, I’m asking key people to quietly move from their homes to the dorm at Homeland Security. Pack a bag. Come out to the campus when you can. Also, I’m relieving Admiral Galli. You’ll run that unit.”
The breath caught in her throat. Burke continued. “General Homza thinks we’re dealing with seeding.”
Seeding means that a hostile group is planting toxics in different places. A quiet attack, which spreads. An attack whose origin is harder to determine.
“Homza believes the capital is a likely target.”
“Aren’t you getting ahead of things?”
“I hope so. That’s my job.”
“What about Aya?”
Burke said, “You can move her in with you, or you can send her away. Look, it’s just precaution, like drills. Terrorism alert level up everywhere. Airports. Amtrak. Federal buildings. I want my people in a protected area. If this gets worse, you’re separated from the general population. Better to have your things at HQ just in case.”
“I want Rush to come with me to Nevada.”
Personally, I don’t want him anywhere near me. He makes me crazy. But he’s the best person for this job.
“He’s out,” Burke said. “Plenty of FBI out West to help you.”
“Burke, he’s smart. He sees things before other people, and in a different way. He stopped the outbreak in Alaska last year. He’s an eyewitness in Somalia, and something he saw there might be relevant. You want me? I need him. Or is there some special reason you want him out?”
Daring Burke now. Daring him to say the thing out loud that he’d hinted at earlier. If you want me to know something, spell it out. Don’t go off to a bathroom and leave a file on a desk. Have some guts!
But Burke caved. Or acknowledged the logic. Burke said, “He’s your responsibility then, and only if his blood work is clear. But if he goes off on his own, I lock him away. You tell him that.”
“Have we identified the pathogen yet?”
“It’s a hybrid. Chimera. They nailed some DNA, Gaines said, but not enough for full ID. Can’t tell yet if it’s lab made or natural. That may take some time.”
“And what part did they ID?” Chris asked as the car stopped beside a long runway, and ahead, through shimmering air, she saw Joe Rush’s jet touch down, wheels puffing smoke, sun glinting off the windows flashing past.
Burke told her the basic component of the Nevada pathogen. The primary bacterial foundation of the thing.
She felt her legs go weak and flashed to Aya in her head, at a high school science fair, smiling, a kid, an innocent, her only daughter. Chris said, “Sweet, sweet Jesus.”
Burke sighed. “I’d say that’s exactly right.”
SIX
“Leprosy?” I said.
We waited in the plane for the results of our blood work, to see if we were infected. The fingers on my right hand had begun tingling, but I told myself that this was because, before landing, I’d fallen asleep on my hand. The troops surrounding our jet kept their distance, ringing us at sixty feet with M4s slung over their shoulders.
“Here we go again,” Eddie said. “Something we ate?”
The lone, small figure of Chris Vekey stood outside the window, on the tarmac, looking up as she spoke via phone.
I tried to ignore my anger and concentrate on what she was saying, but the truth was, if Burke and Chris had been open with us earlier, we might have spotted something in Africa that would help us now. But they’d hidden facts, delayed giving information. Need to know was the curse of Washington, creating a perpetual catch-up race during crises, a drumbeat of too late.
Now Eddie and I saw leprosy up on our screens, on our thumb drive medical encyclopedias. Right side showed a rogue’s gallery of photos — faces eaten away, fingers nubs, feet stumps — going back to 1850.
Eddie said, “The facts don’t go with what we saw, One. You never get leprosy in groups.”
Chris’s voice in my ear said, “Now you do.”
“It doesn’t spread this fast. Normal germination after infection, one to three years. In extreme cases, six months. And it’s rarely fatal.”
Chris said, “This strain is.”
I broke in, flaring at her, “The admiral is fired, you say? He’s a good man! You’re our boss now?”
“Yes.”
My rage crested. We’d been lied to and we’d been threatened with death in Somalia. We’d been forced to undergo radio silence on the long ride home because our multimillion-dollar communication system was on the blink — they claimed. I’d misjudged this woman, I saw. I’d thought she was different than the backbiting social climbers that populated the capital, self-serving know-it-alls who talked piously of policies and manipulated them for personal gain.
Chris Vekey, I saw, had waited for an emergency to ally herself with Burke, to force a good man into retirement, just when the country needed him. Now she blithely expected Eddie and me to snap to and obey her, pliant as toy soldiers. But we weren’t that and had never been.
“Go to hell,” I said.
“What?”
“What you did to the admiral stinks.”
“Watch your temper,” she warned. Out on the tarmac, she was a stiff, glaring presence in a parka, her gamine face shocked, her voice snapping out in white smoky bursts.
I retorted that we were private contractors. We were retired from the service, here only because of private university ties. “Burke’s lapdog”—as I called her — could not tell us what to do.
She stared up at me with a stony expression. But Southern women don’t outmaneuver you with a bludgeon. They do it with a soft voice, a steel backbone. “Those Alabama girls can break the balls off a Rodin statue with a look,” Eddie once said, the truth of that made evident now.
“Colonel, for your information, once you signed on, you’re bound by your agreement. If you violate that, and leave, fine with me. I’ll make a phone call and where you’ll go is Leavenworth prison.”