The next morning, he walked the two blocks to his new office, hoping the cool air would mitigate his hangover. He checked the address twice when he arrived. The military leaders of a past era had sought to intimidate and impress with their structures, the Pentagon being the ultimate example: a city unto itself in a mythic, magical shape. The Alliance, Pete had learned, sought the opposite; they wanted to disguise and obscure the true scope of their power by distributing their vast resources across anonymous leased offices and buildings across the land. Like the drones, the Alliance sought security in redundancy, and vast, wide distribution. Such networks, Pete well knew, were almost impossible to kill. The building where Pete reported had just six stories, of which the Alliance occupied only the top floor. The ground floor contained a Subway sandwich shop and a dentist’s office. One of the other tenants in the building was a financial advisor, whose darkened windows and security door looked far more secretive than the Alliance office where Pete found himself that morning, with its unlocked front door, unmanned reception desk, and new carpet smell.
Inside the suite, he found his way to office 16-E, where the door was locked. There was a keypad, but he had no code. He rang a buzzer, and could hear movement inside. He could tell the door was solid; he’d been behind enough serious security doors to recognize one when he saw it: the heavy weight, the precise balancing, the hidden hinges. He heard a click within the door, and he pushed it open.
Inside were two men, looking up at him somewhat suspiciously from their drab metal desks. They were at opposite ends of the small office, as far apart as they could arrange: Pete sensed instantly that the two men didn’t like each other. A large, tattered world map had been hung from the center wall, a series of colored pins pressed into it. Above one man’s desk was a small flat-screen television, tuned to one of the news channels that was favorable to the Alliance, with the sound muted. The screen periodically seized and pixelated, as if the cable connection was poor.
“You the new officer in charge?”
“I am,” he said. “Pete Hamlin. Pleased to meet you. Is this the whole team?”
The younger man stood and raised his hands dramatically. “This is it. I’m Reggie Strack,” he said, walking over with a hand extended.
“You’re the doctor?”
“I am — your resident physician. Epidemiologist. Serving the Alliance by combatting the flu.”
“How long?”
“Fighting the flu? My whole career. But I’ve only been working for the Alliance six months.” He had an earnest look, and a friendly, open manner.
The other man had made his way over. “Steve Harkness,” he said. “I’m an Alliance communications specialist.” Harkness was the kind of young man who exuded ambition. His clothes were casual, but neatly pressed and well tailored, the kind of garments worn by a man who occasionally expected, or hoped, to be photographed. “I’m here to get the word out, raise awareness both about the flu and the Alliance’s efforts to help the sick and find a cure.”
He stopped. Pete was aware that both men were sizing him up, deciding whether or not they could trust him.
“So,” said Pete. His mouth was still dry from his hangover, his voice scratchy. “Is this a real disease, or a propaganda operation?”
Harkness winced at the word, but Strack laughed. “It is a real, frightening disease,” he said. “And this is a massive propaganda operation.”
Pete did the minimum amount of work he could do to get by, and spent the rest of his time alone to mourn Pamela. While he still wanted to figure out what had gone wrong, he was glad in a way that the Alliance hadn’t assigned him to anything to do with the drones. He loathed himself for his part in Pamela’s death, and had vivid nightmares in which he would follow a drone, in his mind, from Eris Island, where he had probably cheered its departure, to Mexico, where it dropped the single, ugly bomb that ended her life. He tried to fight it off, but he couldn’t help but imagine her final moments. Was she beside the pool, in one of the prized lounge chairs near the bar? Or was she in the water, lazily paddling back and forth as the men poolside watched her through their sunglasses? Maybe she was wading in the ocean, up to her knees in the sea, and saw the drone fly in. Perhaps she thought it was Pete’s plane in the distance, returning him to their honeymoon. He imagined her squinting at it curiously when she realized that this plane had no windows.
Pete’s team had weekly meetings in Silver Spring with other research groups, where they presented their findings to an indifferent panel of officers led by General Cushing, who always sat in the middle of the group and nodded his head, his strong hands folded in front of him. He rarely spoke, but when he did, the room always fell respectfully silent. He had a chest full of ribbons on an Army uniform, ribbons that Pete could tell, even from across the room, were regular Army commendations, not Alliance. He had a combat infantry badge and jump wings, and the ribbons themselves were the kind that you saw only on regular military officers. Alliance ribbons had a smooth appearance, colors that looked like they had been chosen carefully by focus groups and laid out by designers. Real military ribbons had a knotty, disorganized look, like combat itself, a random assortment of colors and patterns, here and there adorned with dark stars or a bronze V that Pete learned stood for Valor. Just as Alliance officers were being given military commands to demonstrate that they were all, in fact, one team, combat officers like Cushing were being given Alliance commands. He scowled continuously at their weekly meetings, like it was a duty he had accepted grudgingly, and he couldn’t wait to get back into a position where people were shooting at him.
Their weekly meetings took place every Tuesday, along with three other detachments. Each group was given fifteen minutes to talk, five minutes for each man on the team. Pete had no idea how many of these meetings the generals had to sit through in a week, how many well-polished five-minute speeches they had to endure. It was amazing, sometimes, how much information a man could cram into five minutes, and at times it was amazing how little. But the schedule never varied.
Strack, in his five minutes, would detail the latest outbreak numbers, emphasizing that the problem was uncontained. Harkness would describe, and occasionally show, the media campaigns that his group had created to promote hand washing and the idea that only the Alliance could find a cure. After they were done, Pete was offered a chance to elaborate, a chance he always declined, opening up five minutes on the agenda to someone more eager than he to kiss the ass of a table full of generals.
It was a forty-mile drive from Silver Spring back to Frederick. In bad traffic, it could take well over an hour, and Pete usually welcomed the time alone in his car. “Alone with his thoughts,” would be inaccurate. He preferred to be without thought entirely, his guilt-ridden mind wiped clean at least for a moment. Inching along in traffic was one of the few places he could actually achieve this thoughtless state. Most times he didn’t even turn his radio on.
Somewhere near Germantown, he got off of I-270 to get a cup of coffee. Traffic was inching along, and no one was expecting him back at the office anyway. Even off the interstate, though, traffic still crawled. It was starting to rain a dreary, light mist, and Pete wasn’t able to let his mind drift the way he wanted to in the stop-and-go traffic.
He came to realize that this was no normal traffic jam brought on by the daily commute; something was going on. Cops at intersections were directing traffic; barricades lined the road. Crowds of people were walking, all in the same direction he was driving, all traveling at roughly the same speed, allowing Pete to track the small groups that walked hand in hand down the sidewalk. It was the same kind of foot traffic you might see before a sporting event, a walk to the stadium — except this was a weekday, and these people didn’t look excited, they looked grim.