“I want to talk to my girlfriend, sir. Jana’s here, too. But the docs say if we talk, we’ll compare stories. Like we can’t think for ourselves. Like, if she says something, I’ll just agree. But there’s nothing wrong with my brain.”
Okoye was nodding, arms folded. The principle was the same one police used when separating witnesses to a crime, or co-conspirators. For the first few hours, you needed fresh perspectives. So you interviewed people separately. But my witnesses were sick, not criminals. After a while they wouldn’t need to stay apart. I explained this to Reyes. He could talk to Jana soon. He did not like it. But he said, “No one explained it before like that.”
Twenty minutes later I’d learned nothing new about symptoms, but I knew, He goes to the bar in Galilee regularly, and he was last there nine days ago.
I asked, “Anything happen there that night? Out of the ordinary? A person? A taste? Argument?”
“It was Tech Sergeant Mack’s birthday. We celebrated.”
“Is Sergeant Mack sick, too?”
“He died, I heard.”
Reyes’s girlfriend, Jana, was in the snapshot on his night table. A smiling Reyes — handsome man — had his arm around a happy, slim, plain-faced woman in tight jeans, a checkered shirt, and a felt cowboy hat with the brim turned down to highlight blue eyes. They were on a boardwalk. It looked like the Santa Monica Pier. I saw lots of bare skin in it, and all the skin looked fine.
“Pretty girl,” I said.
“Colonel Rush, one more thing. Dumb little thing, but it will mean a lot to her. She’s terrified.”
“Tell me.”
“If I can’t talk to her, I want to do something for her. To make her feel better. There’s this restaurant in Vegas, sir. Jana can’t get enough of the Napoli Volcano Special,” said the wrecked mouth. “I asked the other doctor, can you get her one? Comfort food? Three cheeses? Special sauce? I’ll pay. He said no. She’s scared, sir. Please. She’s like an addict for that sandwich.”
“Dr. Okoye,” I asked, “why can’t she have the food?”
“Dr. Markowitz advised against this.”
“Who is Dr. Markowitz?”
“He’s our gastroenterologist. He’s trying to eliminate milk products as the cause of—”
“Milk products? For Christ’s sake,” I snapped. “Captain Reyes, what’s the sandwich she likes?”
“The Napoli Volcano Special.”
Half the patients here might be dead in twenty-four hours, and some asshole was denying someone a sandwich?
I ordered a nurse, “Get food for everyone. I’ll pay. I don’t care if someone has to drive to Vegas. Get her what she wants, however you do it. Captain, we’ll do this.”
One lone tear oozed out of his left eye, smearing a track.
I said, “I promise that I’ll tell you personally if I learn more. If I’m not here, I’ll call. Now, Dr. Okoye? You think I could get a ride into Galilee?”
Outside, he sighed. “You’re a good person, Joe.”
Chris sat stiffly in the Humvee beside me, moon man and woman, in our suits. More ambulances pulled up. She knows the truth about me. She knew about Joe Rush and the subject of revenge. Giving a patient sandwiches makes no difference on Judgment Day. A gift of prosciutto and peppers means nothing when weighed against the big questions, and Chris Vekey knew it.
Half an hour later, we found a clue.
EIGHT
Loading the old Honda Accord for the attack on the capital, Orrin Sykes suddenly felt doubts about the success of the mission. He was horrified by the emotion, even though Harlan had told him it might occur if he was away for too long. Harlan had instructed him on what to do about it.
You are my special warrior, Harlan had said.
Sykes was staying in a rented detached garage/apartment behind an empty Tudor-style home for sale in Northwest Washington, a woodsy neighborhood off Nebraska Avenue. He’d driven down in the secondhand car, and the apartment had previously been used by other people from the farm. He was alone here.
He closed the trunk, getting a last view of the Mossberg M1014 combat shotgun and the uzi with grenade launcher. Those were for defense, if he was interrupted today. Harlan had told him not to be taken alive. But today’s actual weapon fit in his pocket.
Sykes, fighting doubt, climbed the stairs and went through the open door into his one-bedroom apartment.
Sing the songs if you become frightened, Harlan had told him. Purify your thoughts.
Sykes ran a cold bath and dumped in six trays of ice cubes and got into the tub, naked. Back in New Lebanon, doubters sat nude in the snow sometimes, or were whipped while they sang. Sykes rocked back and forth. His teeth chattered. He cleared his head. He was ashamed that he’d even experienced doubt. He felt calm return, and discipline. Harlan was right.
Naked, he toweled off. I am not cold, he thought.
Sykes’s hit on the capital would be the group’s third, he knew, and the effects of the first two attacks should be showing up anytime. There was always a lag time between infection and outbreak.
“The Hebrews went into Canaan and displaced those peoples to create Israel,” Harlan had preached last night to a rapt audience back home, and over encrypted Internet to Sykes. “The armies of Mohammed carried his words on horseback. The Crusaders brought truth by sword.”
Inside the apartment, Sykes had stocked a month’s worth of food and ammunition. Harlan had seen the government plans to isolate the city if the disease got bad. Sykes had U.S. Army self-heating meals, a first aid kit, batteries, water, soap, syringes, bandages, throwaway cell phones, and boxes of Juicy Fruit gum, his weakness.
“Each prophet raised armies of the righteous,” Harlan had told the group last night.
Now, the innocent-looking pill vial went into Sykes’s black over-the-shoulder Tumi bag — the same sort carried by thousands of commuters — along with today’s Washington Post, a manila folder of articles about today’s Capitol Hill hearings, and a legal pad. He’d look like he belonged.
Harlan had said, “The armies of past prophets numbered in the thousands and the tens of thousands. But in this vial is an army of millions.”
Harlan was more than just Orrin’s teacher. Harlan had saved Orrin, and Orrin loved him. Harlan was his past and future. When near Harlan, Orrin felt an all-consuming peace that he had never known before. It was inconceivable that this feeling could be anything but right. He would do anything to keep the feeling.
Now Orrin upped the garage door and backed the Honda out into wintry Washington, draped with light snow. At this moment, he knew, people in the compound in Upstate New York were destroying old computers. Piling laptops and desktops on the ground to be smashed by sledgehammers, the wreckage soaked with gasoline. It would be burned, the plastic melted, the files obliterated, to be replaced by new memories that Harlan had ordered inserted into other computers, unpacked two months ago. The old experiments would be copied into the new computers. The dates on the experiments would change. Anyone reading records later would find real details but false dates. It would look like years-old work had started recently.
Sykes turned the car onto Military Road, a tree-lined thoroughfare of private homes and a strip of park. His heart roared with pride and anticipation. The Honda merged into light midmorning traffic, late commuters, shoppers, a private school bus. Alerted by radio about road work blockages, he planned to take 13th Street toward his destination.