“Go on.”
“Well! Afternoons, I take a walk in the desert. I can’t take Sinatra anymore because the wheels on the roller get stuck in rocks. So I leave him here. I can still do two miles. Exercise helps me sleep.”
“The tourists were in the desert,” I guessed.
“I was coming up a rise. I heard them.”
“Singing.”
“Yes, some religious song. When they saw me, they stopped.”
“Why do you think it was a religious song?”
“Why? Well! I didn’t hear all the words. I guess it was the cadence, slow, you know, like Gregorian Chants. Chanticleer. Adorate Deum. Beautiful, relaxing music. Calms you right down! I used to have my students listen to it. Not exactly what they were used to.”
“They were singing Gregorian chants?”
“No, it was like that but wasn’t. It was English. But it had that same somber, what’s the word? Repetition! Like a liturgy. What you’d hear at a mass, not exactly something hikers go around singing.”
“A liturgy,” I said.
“But different. I heard a few words. Something about prophets smiting evil.” She scrunched up her wizened face, trying to remember. “The first prophet… the sixth… then they saw me and stopped.”
“Did you talk to them?”
“They seemed nice. I asked what they were singing.”
“What did they say?”
“That’s funny! I don’t think they answered. They were very enthusiastic, though, asking about the town, the rocks here, the old mine. But they didn’t actually answer about the singing. A little spacey but nice. My husband, Al, used to say you get all kinds out West. Dissatisfied people. He called the highway to California the Charles Manson Trail.”
“Did they happen to identify their church group?”
“I didn’t ask. I like music, but I’m not big on religions,” she said. “My ancestors were Huguenots. Protestants murdered in France. Music is peaceful, but in the end”—she shuddered—“too much religion makes people fight.”
Outside, I turned to Eddie. Our phones were useless in town because of the jamming, so we had no idea if anyone had been trying to reach us while we were here, if Chris was having success reaching Burke.
“Remember those two guys in Somalia, singing?”
“Weren’t they singing about prophets, too?”
“All religions sing about prophets.”
“Chris should have been back by now,” he fretted.
She’d been gone for forty-five minutes. And over the next ninety minutes she still did not return. But we were occupied, making rounds of houses, talking to a family of six: a postal worker, who looked healthy; a retired uranium miner, healthy; a Vietnamese immigrant, who was coughing; a brother-sister team, who lived together and gave me the creeps, because of the way they sat, hip to hip. The sister showed deterioration around her nose.
Our notebooks filled with jottings, our recorders with frightened voices; a mélange of facts, figures, and impressions. Nothing in particular stood out.
“Two hours,” Eddie said, yawning. “Where is she?”
“More importantly, where’s Broad Street?”
Broad Street was our shorthand for the London corner where the science of disease tracking began. It was the epicenter of the worst cholera outbreak in that city’s history, which ravaged it in 1854.
At the time, the finest medical minds believed that illness came from vapors, bad air, which they called miasma. When cholera struck, bringing vomiting, leg cramps, rampant diarrhea, and fatal shock, bad air was, as usual, blamed.
But a physician named John Snow wasn’t so sure about that, so he went door to door, asking questions, drawing maps of the spread. He asked locals about their eating and drinking habits, travel, hygiene, symptoms.
Eventually he realized that every single victim drank water from the Broad Street public water pump.
Snow’s idea about the pump was revolutionary. At first he could not convince authorities that the disease was spread by a well. But finally they grew so desperate that, at Snow’s urging, they removed the handle from the Broad Street pump, and the epidemic ground to a stop.
Now Eddie and I sought the modern version of Snow’s pump handle. We trudged house to house, asking questions and answering complaints.
— My kids like Fruit Loops, but all the soldiers are giving us is Cheerios.
— My reading glasses broke.
— No one is collecting our garbage!
An exhausting three hours later, we’d confirmed that every initial victim had been in Gazarra’s on that Friday night. From there, the pathogen had spread to some people and bypassed others.
“It breaks out in Africa first,” Eddie said, frowning. “Then here. You think there’s something in the drones themselves; some component, some chemical they’re carrying, maybe a drone crashed… what do you think, One? The drones?”
“Something they ate or drank.”
“Why?”
“Two initial outbreaks in groups. But no contact between them, no supplies moving between the groups. In Africa, no air vents, no air-conditioning. But everyone eating the same food at the same time and in the same place every day. Here, people fell ill after a group meal.”
“If it’s canned, there will be outbreaks. It could be anywhere.”
I shook my head. “If it was randomly shipped, there would have been more outbreaks by now, I’d think.”
“Who did it, then?”
“Who has access to both places?”
“Plenty of people hate the drone program.”
It should have been a positive moment, an inch of progress at least, a theory. We’d reached the last home on the street. A hand-scrawled sign nailed to the front door read, SICK. GONE TO HOSPITAL. PRAY FOR US. We’d been spared another interview. I felt some relief.
“Where the hell is Chris?”
As if in answer, here came Humvees, three of them. Only one had been needed when we’d been brought into town.
“Too soon for the next medical check,” said Eddie.
“They’re coming pretty fast,” I said.
When the Humvees reached us and the first small biosuited figure emerged, I saw it was Chris; but spilling after her from the other two vehicles came troops made beefier by combat biogear. Their weapons were held ready, and from the stiff, wary way the soldiers eyed us, with a sinking feeling I realized that they were not here for the citizens of Galilee, but for us.
“Burke wants us out of here,” she said.
There was no doubt that something fundamental had changed.
“What’s wrong, Chris?”
“Please put your notes and recorders in a ziplock. Hand them over to Sergeant Leachy. We’re out,” said Chris. “Me, too.”
Eddie tried to make light of it, voice easy, but body stiffening. “Oh? Something we did?”
Chris stared back, disconsolate. “Yes,” she said. “We’re all under arrest.”
TEN
The cell was five by eight and lacked a window. Meals — roast beef, boiled potatoes and milk, eggs and soggy bacon — were inserted through a metal slot but I had little desire to eat. Light came in two varieties, artificial glare and red nightlight. The guards were silent extensions of the cinderblock. No reading material allowed, no television or radio, no explanation of why we’d been flown to Camp Pendleton, California, kept separate, and buried in a brig.
“Give me a hint. Why are we here?”