Choppers.
The Marines hit the fence points as gunships raked the grounds. The little guardhouse blew apart. The strung-up Christmas lights bounced, their wires shot to pieces, with the loudspeakers. Now the chorus was one of terror and confusion. Heaven had come all right, the sky had spewed forth messengers, but not in the way Harlan had predicted.
A fire started up in one of the buildings and flames shot out. I tried to stand. I couldn’t. I needed to reach the cluster of barrels and stop the timer and pull out the wires. His people had forgotten about me. They were running and screaming and trying to hide. And then I saw Harlan Maas lurching across the yard.
Alone, he headed straight for the barrel bombs. He was going to set them off. The ground burst around him, bullets whining and missing and spraying off. To the Marines, Harlan was just one more person here, no more dangerous than the others. In fact, he was older, so maybe less dangerous to them. He did not carry a firearm. He looked like a frightened guy running for shelter. He wove through their fire as if protected by heaven. He sped up with only twenty yards to go. He was fast crabbing toward those fertilizer bombs like a tropism of destruction, fifteen yards, ten, then only twenty feet separated him from carrying out his plan.
I forced myself to my feet. “Harlan!”
His legs kept pumping but his head cocked and I knew he’d heard me. Rather than slowing him, that seemed to propel him forward.
“Harlan! I don’t want to shoot!”
I hit him with two shots. They seemed to be absorbed into him and propelled him forward. Like I’d added jet propulsion to his momentum. Four feet to go. His hands reached out. His head strained forward like he was an Olympic runner trying to stumble across the finish line. His whole body tilted toward whatever switch would set things off, blow the whole compound, buildings, lab, cure, us.
Harlan’s legs tangled and he crumbled. Marines were on the grounds. They’d poured through a gap in the fence. They were taking control, the choppers lowering and snow flying up, not down, and troops shouting instructions and surviving men, women, and children on their knees.
“You!” a Marine shouted at me. “Hands up!”
But Harlan was still moving. The Marine didn’t understand what I saw. I must have looked like one of Harlan’s people. Harlan was crawling toward the barrels. Reaching the barrels. Pulling himself up.
“DROP THAT GUN!” the Marine yelled at me.
I heard firing as I pulled the trigger.
A sledgehammer hit me and drove me back and down. The sky went in circles as I waited for the immense blast.
The pain ballooned inside me, white hot. The ground was as hard and cold as it had been in Jerusalem, two thousand years ago, when snow coated Christ in the high hills in April, when he mounted his donkey, when denizens of that time believed that the Messiah had come to Earth.
TWENTY-TWO
It was white, clean, and quiet in the hospital, even the soft beeping of the heart machine a soothing cadence through twilight sleep. The doctors bending over me did not wear masks. Odd, I thought since they knew I was infected. Over the last few days, hospitals had lost their quiet. It had been replaced by pandemonium in hallways. A constant stream of sirens. Exhausted staffers losing tempers and screaming, panicked patients who knew that they were doomed from a mutated, resurgent disease.
“Colonel Rush? I think I saw his eyes move!” a voice said.
A second voice. “How long has he been unconscious?”
“Four days.”
I fell back into dreamless sleep.
At a flash of light I opened my eyes and focused. Homeland Assistant Secretary Burke was standing by my bed. So were a half dozen photographers, who kept shooting photos as my vision cleared. Galli stood beside Burke. So did Eva Mendes from the White House. She should have been underground, in Virginia. Why wasn’t she there? Mendes looked proud and happy. Beyond her, a cluster of nurses stood out in the hall, looking in.
My lips formed a word. “Burke.”
He swung a chair around and sat, arms over the top just like Harlan Maas in his lab. His aftershave seemed effeminate against the disinfectant and all the flowers. He was shiny shaved, his gray suit immaculate. String tie. Dress boots. Burke.
“The President’s going to give you a medal,” he said. “But while you slept, I saw your other medals.” His eyes moved down the blanket to where my foot was visible, and the two amputated toes, which I’d lost in Alaska. “The chest,” he said. That meant the bandages. “The hand.” He meant the leprosy. “Those are the real medals.”
I had to give him credit. He wasn’t going to be phony and pretend we were friends, or even that we liked each other. He wasn’t going to say things that made him look good for the press. I liked him better for that.
He told the cameramen, “You can go.” Which meant, Get out of here. He told me, after they did, “You did good.” This meant, No thanks to me.
I closed my eyes. The pain in my chest was a deep thrumming, and there was heat in my skull and a kind of cool hard tingle midway up my left wrist. I held up a finger. My hand was wrapped up, but it was all there.
“I’d hold a grudge, too, if I were you,” he said.
“I don’t, Burke. Everything you said about me is true.”
He nodded, appreciating that. “It is. But it blinded me to the other part. Ten more minutes, Colonel, and the Marines would have found a smoking pit instead of a laboratory. Ten million more people would have died, and we’d be at war and that nut would have gotten what he wanted. Annihilation. Every step of the way, Colonel,” he said softly. “Every step, I tried to stop you.”
He added, “We found you because Aya Vekey tracked the place down. Chris bulled her way into my office.”
“Your regrets aren’t my problem, Mr. Secretary.”
“Well, the thing is, knowing what I know now, I would have done the same thing,” he said. “Guys like you, sooner or later they drag everyone else into a disaster.” I liked him more for that, too, but candor only goes so far. He asked, “Need anything, Colonel?”
“No.”
“Small point,” he said, “but you’ve been reinstated.”
Grinning hurt. “Into where? Leavenworth?”
He had a boomer laugh, hearty. Texas. “Now I know you’re getting better. Good-bye, Colonel. I didn’t think you’d take me up on the offer. You are, of course, released from your contract. You’ve got some rehab time coming up. On us. If you ever need anything, don’t hesitate.”
“I usually don’t.”
He turned and left, his cowboy boots clomping on the linoleum. Mendes followed him. Nurses shooed away reporters in the hallway. I turned my head. Out the window, Washington. Still the same.
The nurse who came to check my vitals told me what I’d surmised from the lack of masks, and the topics that Burke and I had discussed. There was no panic here. Only mop-up. Harlan’s cure worked.
Another nurse, waving off the reporters, sounded annoyed with them.
Colonel Rush needs to sleep.
Eddie stood at my bedside, and so did the admiral. Chris Vekey was at the foot of the bed, beside Aya, who clutched a gigantic bunch of bright yellow flowers. She’d been crying. But she was also smiling. She looked between my face and her mother’s like a kid hoping her parents would make up after a bad fight.
“Shot twice. He’s not a man,” Eddie said in a mock radio voice, like some quavery 1930s horror show announcer. “He’s a super-steroid-driven animal!”
“What happened to Harlan?” I asked.