“You can really get Aya to Virginia?” she said.
“There’s going to be a second wave sent down, once people are tested and disease-free.”
Rush had eased himself to the outer edge of the line. Rush ambled away from the line, into and across Reservoir Road. Rush was a diminishing shadow moving out of the streetlight, into the darkness of Glover-Archbold Park, one more person tired of standing on line, or changing his mind about checking into the hospital, one more lone individual on a night filled with emergencies, going off alone. She saw a gate guard watch him go. No big deal.
“Thanks for trying,” she told Havlicek.
“I’ll come back and check on you guys again,” Ray said, and squeezed her arm. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
She hurried into the main hospital building. Instantly, the sounds of mayhem echoed off the cinderblock walls: babies crying, someone shouting over a public service announcement, an apology for long waits in the emergency room.
I never saw you, Joe. I hate the choices you give me. Funny, but maybe if Ray had not offered Virginia, I might have told him. But it sounded like a deal. You’re on your own, Joe, whatever you are doing out there, whatever you have done.
FIFTEEN
I slipped unnoticed into the small bamboo garden behind the admiral’s two-story house. The massed shoots and high picket fence blocked neighbors’ views of the yard. The key was where he always left it, under the metal flowerpot on the screened porch. I let myself into the kitchen and punched in the alarm code, 1776. Eddie and I had been guests there so often that we knew the system. We came and went as we pleased.
Robert Morton knew I was going to be at the cathedral. Who is the traitor?
Grant Road, where the admiral lived, was in Northwest D.C., named after the general who won the American Civil War. It was a lovely narrow street off Nebraska and Wisconsin, a tree-lined Americana where neighbors knew each other, shared cookouts, watched out for each other’s properties, even helped each other shovel snow. The neighbors knew me as a regular guest there. If they saw me, I hoped they’d think nothing of it.
Could the traitor be Chris Vekey? She told Burke I’d left. Could it be Burke? Once Burke knew, others would, too.
The house had been left heated at fifty degrees, which, after four exhausting hours outside, seemed like a luxurious seventy. The air vent system hissed; the stainless steel refrigerator sighed. Pinprick tingling in my fingertips indicated some warmth returning. In winters I usually feel extra chilled where my amputated toes had been. Once you get frostbite, as I had in Alaska last year, the sensation always surfaces in cold.
Or is it possible that Robert Morton was waiting for me at the hospital and followed me? That would still mean I could be dealing with a traitor inside the investigation.
Normally, a drive from the hospital here would have taken no more than ten minutes. Metro busses made the trip from Tunlaw to Tenley in double that. But I’d needed hours to walk a mere 3.5 miles and stay clear of police and soldiers. I’d circled around an apartment building fire on Fulton and Wisconsin, as an exhausted, understaffed crew of firemen tried to get it under control, and pajama-clad residents watched. I’d ducked behind a parked Chevy Tahoe to avoid a gang of young men, judging from their laughter, who were smashing car windows with tire irons and baseball bats. More widely spaced headlights connoted Humvees patrolling near Macomb Street, where looters had sacked the Safeway. I moved through backyards and alleys, slid past lit homes and abandoned ones, used side streets paralleling Wisconsin, zigzagged my way toward the best place I could think of that might provide a temporary place to hide.
Ray Havlicek knew I was going to the hospital, and could have had someone waiting for me. Burke knew. Their assistants probably knew. Who to trust?
I fell into a chair at Galli’s kitchen table and tossed a plastic RadioShack shopping bag on top. Out spilled what I’d run off with through the store’s bashed-in front grille. Other looters had gone for computer components and audio systems. I’d taken prepaid disposable cell phones, the last twenty on display. I’d been one more figure in the half dark, hunting supplies amid a maze of crushed display boxes, tangled wiring, and rifled cash registers. No sirens outside, just flashlight beams amid the grunting and footfalls of other people’s desperation.
I thought wryly, At least the looting was predicted in our old war games. Other than that, it’s make things up as you go.
In the fridge I found sliced ham, Swiss cheese, dill pickles, and romaine lettuce, shoved a food mass between two slices of seven-grain bread, and started wolfing it down. I guzzled water from the faucet and found a bottle of Maker’s Mark Bourbon in the liquor cabinet. Sticking with water would be smarter. I poured bourbon into a ceramic mug and sprawled at the table. I clicked the TV remote that operated the SONY flat screen on the wall.
Let’s get the big picture.
CNN exploded on, with its usual head-churning montage, ten shots at once, and a running national death toll on the bottom, numbers rising one by one, jumping ten, then a pause, then thirty more, then fifty. TAMPA AND LOS ANGELES UNDER MARTIAL LAW, the banner read. Gas gouging in nine states, mob sacks hospital in Orlando for medicine after a rumor spreads that there’s a cure there… Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York holding round-the-clock masses. Survivalists in Idaho peering out of a barbed wire fence, automatic rifles slung over their shoulders.
“We’ve been preparing for twenty years,” one said.
NATIONAL DEATH TOLL: 22,856.
I clicked to NBC, and overhead shots of highways, nothing moving in Chicago, National Guard monitoring the interstate in Tennessee, blocked to all but official traffic by the governor, everything normal in Oklahoma City. Some airports open to disease-free essential personnel, others closed. Food convoys snaking down I-95, the East Coast corridor, driven by Marines.
CONFIRMED TOTAL CASES: 84,749 so far.
Christ.
I saw the nation in colored swatches, red for highly infected areas, with crimson blobs covering Los Angeles, Reno, and New York City; light blue connoting disease-free North Texas and splashes of Deep South and northern Maine, Denver, Indianapolis, Galveston, Santa Fe.
Europe and Asia almost disease-free, with U.S. flights barred from entry.
Pulsing green marking avenues of spread: highways, air travel lanes, ship and rail routes.
Freight trains moving, an announcer said. Passenger trains not.
Fox News broadcast a timeline: infected areas yesterday, with brown marking the previous day, pink the day before. PBS showed a rolling montage of disaster: Dallas ambulance attendants taking away dead on gurneys; Brooklyn homeless, faces eaten away; gas gouging on I-80, $41 a gallon; a faith healer tent rally in Mississippi, hallelujah; doctors arrested in Madison, Wisconsin, for selling salt tablets labeled antibiotics.
“Beware of charlatans,” the announcer said. “There is no known cure to the Bible Virus. Go to a designated triage center if you become ill.”
The moving banner offered bullet points. POPE ASKS WORLD TO PRAY FOR AMERICA. U.S. SIXTH FLEET ORDERED TO STAY FAR FROM HOME, TO KEEP SAILORS SAFE.
As I clicked to local news, I unwrapped the first disposable cell phone, or more accurately, needed a scissor to cut the damn vacuum wrapping off. Whoever invented this stuff probably worked for Homeland Security. It was harder to open than a vault at Chase Manhattan.