Dr. Jesus.
One or two had turned away, doubting, eyeing the syringes with suspicion. Most — especially the visibly sick — had done what Harlan asked, from belief or desperation. Why come just to look? I’d rolled up my sleeve as a small, dark-haired woman in white approached me. The woman’s tray held wrapped syringes and glass vials. A second woman, grandmotherly and older, administered shots as smoothly as a nurse. Maybe she was one. Just as they reached me, I felt the muzzle of the carbine press into my back.
All who wish to come to our farm are welcome.
My cell was the size of a holding area at a small town police station. The lab was in a farmhouse basement and the compound was like the hole of a donut, surrounded by state forest and an abandoned quarry, and it was fenced in with razor wire. I’d seen a lot of activity when our little convoy returned. Residents appeared to be readying for a celebration; sweeping the grounds of snow, stringing colored lights, setting up tables. I hadn’t seen a celebration of any sorts in weeks. No one else had anything to celebrate.
As I was prodded onto a porch, I noticed more of the oil drums. Some had been back at the gate, others were clustered beside the house, with small antennae and timers on top. They weren’t defensive barrels, not the kind you use as a truck bomb barrier, line ’em up around the perimeter of a property to be protected. They were the other kind of barrels, the kind you fill with explosives, and then, as guards were doing before my eyes, you tested connections going into the timers, to make sure the current worked.
Each signal in this frightening place was clear but the combination was contradictory. The lights meant party. The barrels meant explosions. The syringes meant cures. The lab meant infection.
“Please remove your belt, Colonel Rush,” the taller guard said when we stopped before the cage.
“You know my name?”
They looked calm. Everyone up top had been smiling, at each other, at least, if not at me. I’d been in armed camps before and the mood was usually wary. But here I sensed a cheerful passivity. Island of the Lotus Eaters. Up top, men, women, and children had watched me pass with no more than idle curiosity, and then gone back to their jobs at hand. Joe Rush. No threat.
“Can you take these cuffs off?” I asked.
“Harlan said no.”
Harlan said. The lab smelled of animals, deep earth, century-old timbers, and new chemicals. The two dozen armadillos in wire cages had grown agitated when we’d arrived. They’d probably seen what happened to other guests here. The sight of the only other mammal on Earth that carried leprosy confirmed that I’d reached ground zero. We were prisoners together. I was shoved into the cell and hit my knees against the cot chained to the wall. There was no window. There were words scratched on the cinderblock, barely gouged out. Don’t want to die!
“How did you like that sermon?” I asked. Anything to get them talking. The lock was a big Medico and the bars looked firm. If I could talk the men closer, maybe some opportunity would present itself. Maybe I don’t have faith in gods, but I do have hope. There’s always that.
The taller man said, “We’re not supposed to talk to you.”
“I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”
The Asian man regarded the taller one. “Harlan said to check the timers down here,” he said.
“Why? Aren’t they all set to go together?”
“Yeah, but if he wants, we can trigger it from up top or down here!”
I smelled animals and formaldehyde, and something more human and familiar, from the cot. It reminded me of another room near Moscow, where a year earlier a man I hated had been tortured as I watched. The circle turns. The sweat smell reminded me of cracked leather and borscht, which guards had slurped while the man died ranting and salivating, pounding on a wall. I shivered. That smell was a finger pointing at my chest, a reminder of Burke’s words in Washington. I could have stopped what happened in that room near Moscow. I didn’t. So maybe God was in here after all.
I see restraints on those exam tables, and judging from the size of the table, they are for humans.
The steel door opened and Harlan Maas walked in. Joe Rush meets the Sixth Prophet, who coughed, as if getting a cold. Maybe he’d gotten a chill back at the truck stop, where he’d addressed the audience with his parka off. I didn’t know that celestial messengers were susceptible to colds.
His shuffling footsteps sounded like papier-mâché crumpling. His smile was soft, intelligent, and shiny, like everything else in this upside-down place. His blink pattern was off, a little too long, then normal. Maybe he had some minor form of Tourette’s. He pulled a swivel chair away from a lab table, rolled it toward me, and sat backward, arms over the top.
“Joe Rush.”
Harlan Maas looked to be in middle age. Up close, his wide set gray-blue eyes emitted sympathy, peace. Yet they were also tired. His hair was sparse, balding gray-white and bristle short, showing contours of skull. The sideburns flared. He wore a lumberjack’s checked flannel shirt and trousers that bunched at the belt. I guessed that he’d recently lost weight. Either that or he cared little for appearance.
Figure out how to get out of this cage.
“You look just like your photo, Colonel.”
“Who sent it to you? Who’s been giving you information?”
He smiled. He looked toward the ceiling, as if gazing beyond. He was deciding whether to tell me the answer. Why not? Was Ray his contact in D.C.? Was it Burke? Who was the traitor? Who has been helping you all along? I tried to maintain calm, look like it didn’t matter so much.
“Wikileaks,” he said quite seriously.
“Wikileaks?” I was stunned. “You’ve just been reading everything on the Net?”
His eyes flicked upward, toward heaven. “He provides.”
Could it be true? Of course it could be true. The whole damn country had been privy to the committee’s minute-by-minute secret workings in Washington. Wikileaks? Wikileaks? I’d not alerted anyone about Harlan; I’d come up with my strategy after assuming that there was a traitor in Washington. Of all the things he could have said, this was the last one I’d been prepared for. The joke was on me, on the committee, on everyone back home. I felt sick with disgust.
He seemed surprised. “Who did you think it was?”
My laughter bounced off the freezer and walls and faded into the whoosh of artificially circulated air. This was perfect. This was what Eddie the cynic had always predicted. Who needs spies when you have Wikileaks! It was what our strategy games had never covered. Armageddon by accident, by circus, by amateurs and fools.
“Harlan? Why were your guys checking the wires on these barrels?”
If you are ever taken prisoner, make eye contact with your captors, the lecturers always tell us. Try to get them talking. Make yourself a real person to them. Never give up.
“You don’t seem frightened,” Maas said, not answering me. Ask a question, you get one back.
“I’m not.”
Maybe Eddie had been right back in Africa. For the last year I’d sought out every dangerous situation I could find. Now I’d arrived at the great mother of dangerous situations. Chris had been right to try to keep Aya from me. The admiral had tried to protect me from myself, I thought, but then saw that he was the one who’d kept me in the unit. Upon reconsideration, I could not say that Galli had tried to protect me at all.