THIRTEEN 8 page

Then, on the computer screen, he saw the answer. It was right there, under the six: the black queen he needed to move the jack and free up the two and so on. A couple of clicks and it was over. The cards shot up the screen like a pianist’s fingers flying over the keys.

Do you want to play again?

You’re goddamn right he would.

Because the game was the world’s natural state. Because the game was war, it always was, and when wasn’t there a war on, somewhere, to keep a man like Richards in good employ? The last twenty years had been kind to him, a long run at the table with nothing but good news from the cards. Sarajevo, Albania, Chechnya. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran. Syria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Chad. The Philippines and Indonesia and Nicaragua and Peru.

Richards remembered the day—that glorious and terrible day—watching the planes slam into the towers, the image repeated in endless loops. The fireballs, the bodies falling, the liquefaction of a billion tons of steel and concrete, the pillowing clouds of dust. The money shot of the new millennium, the ultimate reality show broadcast 24–7. Richards had been in Jakarta when it happened, he couldn’t even remember why. He’d thought it right then; no, he’d felt it, right down to his bones. A pure, unflinching rightness. You had to give the military something to do of course, or they’d all just fucking shoot each other. But from that day forward, the old way of doing things was over. The war—the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more—the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are—would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn’t notice and couldn’t remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves. It would be fought by young mothers pushing ten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subways with vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks. It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anonymous hotel rooms near airports and mountain caves near nothing at all; it would be waged on train platforms and cruise ships, in malls and movie theaters and mosques, in country and in city, in darkness and by day. It would be fought in the name of Allah or Kurdish nationalism or Jews for Jesus or the New York Yankees—the subjects hadn’t changed, they never would, all coming down, after you’d boiled away the bullshit, to somebody’s quarterly earnings report and who got to sit where—but now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it.

Which was why NOAH had made a certain sense, back when it all started. Richard had been with the project since the beginning, since his first communiqué from Cole, rest in peace, you little shit. He’d known it was something important when Cole actually came to see him in Ankara, five years ago. Richards was waiting at a table by a window when Cole strolled in, swinging a briefcase that probably had nothing in it but a cell phone and a diplomatic passport. He was also wearing a Hawaiian shirt under his khaki suit, a nice touch, like something out of Graham Greene. Richards almost laughed. They ordered a pot of coffee and Cole got started, his smooth face animated with excitement. Cole was from a little town in Georgia, but all those years at Andover and Princeton had tightened up the muscles in his jaw, making him sound like Bobby Kennedy channeling Robert E. Lee. The boy had nice-looking teeth, too, Ivy League teeth, straight as a fence and so white you could read by them in a dark room. So, Cole began, think of the A-bomb, how it changed everything just to have it. Until the Russians set off their own in ’49, the world was ours to do as we liked; for four years it was Pax Americana, bay-by. Now of course everybody and his uncle was cooking one up in his basement, and at least a hundred rust-bucket Soviet-era warheads were floating around on the open market and those were just the ones we knew about, and of course Pakistan and India had burst the cherry with all their bullshit—thanks a bunch, fellas, you made incinerating a hundred thousand people over diddly-squat just another day at the office of the deputy undersecretary of the War on Terr-rah.

But this, Cole said, and sipped his coffee. Nobody else could do this. This was the new Manhattan Project. This was bigger than that. Cole couldn’t go into details, not yet, but for the sake of context, think of the human form itself, weaponized. Think of the American Way as something truly long-term. As in permanent.

Which was why Cole had come to see him. He needed somebody like Richards, he explained, someone off the books, but not only that. Someone practical, with practical skills. People skills, you might say. Maybe not right away, but in the coming months, as the pieces gathered to form the whole. Security was paramount. Security was at the absolute top of Cole’s list. That’s why he had come all this way and put on this ridiculous luau shirt. To get the buy-in. To get this piece of the puzzle nailed down.

All well and good if things had gone according to plan, which they hadn’t, not by a long shot, starting with the fact that Cole was dead. A lot of people were dead, in fact, and some—well, it was hard to say just what they were. Only three people had come out of that jungle alive, not counting Fanning, who was already well on his way to being … well, what? More than Cole had bargained for, that was for sure. There might have been more survivors, but the order from Special Weapons was clear: anybody who didn’t make it to the dust-off was bacon with a side of toast. The missile that screamed in over the mountains had made sure of that. Richards wondered what Cole would have said if he’d known he wouldn’t be one of them.

By then—by the time Fanning was safely locked away, Lear was on-site in Colorado, and everything that had happened in South America had been wiped from the system—Richards had learned what it was all about. VSA, for Very Slow Aging. Richards had to hand it to whoever had dreamed up that one. VSA: Very Silly Abbreviation. A virus or, rather, a family of viruses, hidden away in the world, in birds or monkeys or sitting on a dirty toilet seat somewhere. A virus that could, with the proper refinements, restore the thymus gland to its full and proper function. Richards had read Lear’s early papers, the ones that had gotten Cole’s attention, the first one in Science and the second in Journal of Paleovirology, hypothesizing the existence of “an agent that could significantly lengthen human life span and increase physical robustness and has done so, at select moments, throughout human history.” Richards didn’t need a PhD in microbiology to know that it was risky stuff: vampire stuff, though no one at Special Weapons ever used the word. If it hadn’t been written by a scientist of Lear’s stature, a Harvard microbiologist no less, it all would have sounded like something from the Weekly World News. But still, something about it hit a nerve. As a kid Richards had read his share of such stories, not just the comic books—Tales from the Crypt and Dark Shadows and all the rest—but the original Bram Stoker, and seen the movies too. A bunch of silliness and bad sex, he knew that even then, and yet wasn’t there something about them that struck a deep chord of recognition, even of memory? The teeth, the blood hunger, the immortal union with darkness—what if these things weren’t fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the human animal? A power that could be reactivated, refined, brought under control?

That was what Lear had believed, and Cole too. A belief that had taken them into the Bolivian jungle, looking for a bunch of dead tourists. A bunch of, as it had turned out, undead tourists—Richards disliked the word but couldn’t think of a better one, undeadness being, in the end, a pretty solid descriptor of the condition—who had killed—ripped apart, really—what was left of the research team, all except for Lear, Fanning, one of the soldiers, and a young graduate student named Fortes. If not for Fanning, the whole thing would have been a total loss.

Lear: you had to feel for the guy. Probably he still thought he was trying to save the world, but he’d sold that dream up the river the minute he’d gotten into bed with Cole and Special Weapons. And truth be told, it was hard to say what Lear was thinking these days; the guy never came off L4, slept down there in his lab on a sweaty little cot and took his meals off a hot plate. He probably hadn’t seen the sun in a year. Back at the start, Richards had done a little extra digging, and come up with a number of interesting tidbits, Exhibit A being Lear’s wife’s obituary in the Boston Globe—dated just six months before Cole had come to see him in Ankara, a full year before the Bolivia fiasco. Elizabeth Macomb Lear, age forty-one. BA Smith, MA Berkeley, PhD Chicago. Professor of English at Boston College, associate editor of Renaissance Quarterly, author of Shakespeare’s Monsters: Bestial Transformation and the Early Modern Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2009). A long battle with lymphoma, et cetera. There was a picture, too. Richards wouldn’t have said Elizabeth Lear was a knockout, but she’d been pretty enough, in a slightly undernourished way. A serious woman, with serious ideas. At least there weren’t any kids involved. Probably the chemo and radiation had ruled this out.

So, really, when it came down to it: how much of Project NOAH was really just one grieving man sitting in a basement, trying to undo his wife’s death?

Now, five years later and who knew how many hundreds of millions down the rathole, all they had to show for their troubles were about three hundred dead monkeys, who knew how many dogs and pigs, half a dozen dead homeless guys, and eleven former death row inmates who glowed in the dark and scared the shit out of absolutely everybody. Like the monkeys, the first human subjects had all died within hours, blazing with fever, bleeding out like busted hydrants. But then the first of the inmates, Babcock, had survived—Giles Babcock, as bullshit crazy a man as ever walked the earth; everyone on L4 called him the Talker, on account of the fact that the guy couldn’t shut up even for a second, not before and not after—followed by Morrison and Chávez and Baffes and the rest, each refinement making the virus progressively weaker, so the inmates’ bodies could combat it. Eleven vampires—why not use the word?—who weren’t much good to anyone, as far as Richards could tell. Sykes had confessed that he wasn’t sure you could actually kill them, short of shooting an RPG down their throats. VSA: Vampires, Say Aaaah. The virus had turned their skin into a kind of protein-based exoskeleton, so hard it made Kevlar look like pancake batter. Only over the breastbone, a strike zone about three inches square, was this material thin enough to penetrate. But even that was just a theory.

And the sticks were just crawling with virus. Six months ago, a technician had been exposed; nobody could quite figure out how. But one minute he was fine, the next he was puking onto his faceplate and seizing on the floor of the decon chamber, and if Richards hadn’t seen him twitching on the monitor and sealed the level, who knew what might have happened. As it was, all he’d had to do was purge the chamber and watch the man die, then call for cleanup. He thought the tech’s name was Samuels, or Samuelson. It didn’t matter. The scrubbers showed up clear of virus, and after a seventy-two-hour quarantine, Richards had unsealed the level.

He didn’t wonder for a second that he’d pull the plug, if and when the time came. The Elizabeth Protocol: Richards had to hand it to whoever had come up with the name, if it was somebody’s idea of a joke. Though of course there was no doubt in Richards’s mind who that somebody was. The name was pure Cole—vintage Cole, you might say, since Cole was Cole no more. Beneath that smarmy country club exterior had always lain the heart of a true Machiavellian cutup. Elizabeth, for Christsakes. Only Cole would have actually named it for the guy’s dead wife.

Richards could feel it now; the whole thing was adrift. Part of the problem was the sheer boredom of it all. You couldn’t drop eighty men onto a mountainside with nothing to do but count rabbit skins and ask them to stay put and keep their mouths shut forever.

And then there were the dreams.

Richards had them, too, or thought he did. He never quite remembered. But he sometimes woke up feeling like something strange had happened in the night, as if he’d taken an unplanned trip and only just returned. That’s what had happened with the two sweeps who’d gone AWOL. The castrati had been Richards’s idea, and for a time it had worked out nicely; you’d never meet a more docile bunch of fellows, mellow as the Buddha every one, and when the game was finally over, nobody that anyone was ever going to miss. The two sweeps, Jack and Sam, had gotten out of the compound by stuffing themselves into a couple of garbage bins. When Richards tracked them down the next morning—holed up in a Red Roof by the interstate twenty miles away, just waiting to be caught—that’s all they could talk about, the dreams. The orange light, the teeth, the voices calling their names from the wind. They were just fucking berserk with it. For a while he just sat on the edge of the bed and let them talk it out: two middle-aged sex offenders with skin soft as cashmere and testicles the size of raisins, blowing their noses on their hands, blubbering like kids. It was touching in a way, but you could listen to something like that for only so long. Time to go, boys, Richards said, it’s all right, nobody’s mad at you, and he drove to a place he knew, a pretty spot with a view of a river, to show them the world they’d be leaving, and shot them in the forehead.

Now Lear wanted a kid, a girl. Even Richards had to pause and think about that. A bunch of homeless drunks and death row inmates were one thing, human recyclables as far as Richards was concerned—but a kid? Sykes had explained that it had to do with the thymus gland. The younger it was, he’d told Richards, the better it could fight off the virus, to bring it to a kind of stasis. That was what Lear had been working toward—all the benefits without the unpleasant side effects. Unpleasant side effects! Richards had to allow himself a laugh at that. Never mind that in their former, human lives, the glowsticks had been men like Babcock, who’d cut their mothers’ throats for bus fare. So maybe that had something to do with it, too: Lear wanted a clean slate, somebody whose brain hadn’t filled up with junk yet. For all Richards knew, he’d come asking for a baby next.

And Richards had gotten the goods. A few weeks of trolling until he’d found the right one: Caucasian Jane Doe, approximately age six, dumped like a bad habit at a convent in Memphis by a mother who was probably too strung out to care. Zero footprint, Sykes had told him, and this girl, this Jane-Doe-approximately-age-six, wouldn’t have parted a summer breeze. By Monday, though, she would be in the care of Social Services and you could just kiss her six-year-old backside goodbye. That left a forty-eight-hour window for the grab, assuming the mother didn’t return to claim her, like a piece of lost luggage. As for the nuns, well, Wolgast would find a way to handle them. The guy could sell sunlamps in a cancer ward. He’d proved that well enough.

Richards turned from his screen to eyeball the monitors. All the children were snug in their beds. Babcock looked like he was jabbering away as usual, his throat bobbing like a toad’s; Richards flicked on the audio and listened for a minute to the clicks and grunts, wondering, as he always did, if it added up to something: “Let me out of here” or “I could go for some more rabbits right about now” or “Richards, the first thing I’m doing when I get out of here is coming for you, brother.” Richards himself spoke a dozen languages—the usual European ones, but also Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Russian, Tagalog, Hindi, even a little Swahili—and sometimes, listening to Babcock on the monitor, he got the distinct feeling that there were words in there somewhere, chopped up and scrambled, if only he could teach his ears to hear them. But listening now, all he heard was noise.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

Richards turned to find Sykes standing in the doorway, holding a cup of coffee. He was wearing his uniform but his tie was undone and the flaps of his jacket hung open. He brushed his hand through his thinning hair and spun a chair around to straddle it, facing Richards.

“Right,” Sykes said. “Me neither.”

Richards thought to ask him about his dreams but decided against it: the question was moot. He could read the answer in Sykes’s face.

“I don’t sleep,” Richard said. “Not much, anyway.”

“Yeah, well.” Sykes shrugged. “Of course you don’t.” When Richards didn’t say anything, he tipped his head toward the monitors. “Everything quiet downstairs?”

Richards nodded.

“Anyone else going out for a walk in the moonlight?”

He meant Jack and Sam, the sweeps. It wasn’t Sykes’s style to be sarcastic, but he had a right to be steamed. Garbage bins, for Christsakes. The sentries were supposed to inspect everything coming in or out, but they were just kids, really, ordinary enlisted. They acted like they were still in high school because that’s pretty much all they knew. You had to keep riding them, and Richards had let things slide.

“I’ve spoken to the OD. It’s not a conversation he’s going to forget.”

“You wouldn’t by any chance want to tell me what happened to those guys?”

Richards had nothing to say about that. Sykes needed him, but there was no way he’d ever bring himself to like him or, for that matter, approve of him.

Sykes stood and stepped past Richards to the monitors. He adjusted the gain and zoomed in on the one showing Zero.

“They used to be friends, you know,” he said. “Lear and Fanning.”

Richards nodded. “So I’ve heard.”

“Yeah. Well.” Sykes took in a deep breath, his eyes still locked on Zero. “Hell of a way to treat your friends.”

Sykes turned to point his eyes at Richards, still sitting at his terminal. Sykes looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and his eyes, squinting in the fluorescent light, were cloudy. He appeared, for a moment, like a man who had forgotten where he was.

“What about us?” he asked Richards. “Are we friends?”

Now, that was a new one on Richards. Sykes’s dreams had to be worse than he’d thought. Friends! Who cared?

“Sure,” Richards said, and allowed himself a smile. “We’re friends.”

Sykes regarded him for another moment. “On second thought,” he said, “maybe that’s not such a hot idea.” He waved the idea away. “Thanks anyway.”

Richards knew what was bothering Sykes: the girl. Sykes had a couple kids of his own—two grown boys, both West Point like the old man, one at the Pentagon doing something with intelligence, another with a desert tank unit stationed in Saud—and Richards thought maybe there were grandkids somewhere in the mix, too; Sykes had probably mentioned this in passing, but it wasn’t the sort of thing they usually talked about. Either way, this thing with the girl wasn’t going to sit well with him. Truthfully, Richards didn’t really give a damn what Lear wanted, one way or the other.

“You really should get some shut-eye,” Richards said. “We’ve got intake in”—he checked his watch—“three hours.”

“Might as well just stay up.” Sykes moved to the door, where he turned and gave his weary gaze to Richards again. “Just between us, and if you don’t mind my asking, how’d you get him here so fast?”

“It wasn’t hard.” Richards shrugged. “I got him on a troop transport out of Waco. Bunch of reservists, but it counts as a federal corridor. They landed in Denver a little after midnight.”

Sykes furrowed his brow. “Federal corridor or not, it’s too quick. Any idea what the rush is all about?”

Richards couldn’t say for sure; the order had come from the liason at Special Weapons. But if he had to guess, he would have bet it had something to do with the sweaty cot and soup-encrusted hot plate and a year without sunshine or fresh air, with the bad dreams and the Red Roof and all the rest of it. Hell, if you looked at the situation carefully—something he’d long since stopped bothering to do—it probably all went back to the bookishly pretty Elizabeth Macomb Lear, long battle with cancer, et cetera, et cetera.

“I called in a favor and had the purge done from Langley. Systemwide, soup to nuts. From a big-box perspective, Carter is already nobody. He couldn’t buy a pack of gum.”

Sykes frowned. “Nobody’s nobody. There’s always someone who’s interested.”

“Maybe so. But this guy comes close.”

Sykes lingered another moment at the doorway, saying nothing, both of them knowing what the silence was about. “Well,” he concluded, “I still don’t like it. We have a protocol for a reason. Three prisons, thirty days, then we bring him in.”

“Is that an order?” A joke; Sykes couldn’t give him an order, not really. That he could was a pretense Richards only indulged.

“No, forget it,” Sykes said, and yawned into the back of his hand. “What would we do, return him?” He rapped the side of the door with his hand. “Call me when the van gets here. I’ll be upstairs, not sleeping.”

Funny thing: when Sykes was gone, Richards found himself wishing he’d hung around. Maybe they were friends, in a sense. Richards had been on bad jobs before; he knew there was a moment when the tone changed, like a quart of milk left out on the counter too long. You found yourself talking as if nothing mattered, like the whole thing was already over. That was when you got to actually liking people, which was a problem. Things fell apart fast after that.

Carter was nobody unusual, just another con with nothing but his life to trade away. But the girl: what could Lear want with a six-year-old girl?

Richards returned his attention to the monitors and picked up the earphones. Babcock was back in the corner, chattering away. It was funny: something about Babcock always gnawed at him. It was as if Richards was his, like Babcock owned a piece of him. He couldn’t shake the feeling. Richards could sit and listen to the guy for hours. Sometimes he’d fall asleep at the monitors, still wearing the earphones.

He checked his watch again, knowing that he shouldn’t but unable to stop himself. It was just past three. He wasn’t in the mood for another hand of cards, never mind that little bastard in Seattle, and the hours of waiting for the van to pull into the compound suddenly opened before him like a mouth that could swallow him whole.

There was no fighting it. He adjusted the volume and settled back to listen, wondering what the sounds he heard were trying to tell him.

SIX

Lacey awoke to the sound of rain, fanning into the leaves outside her window.

Amy.

Where was Amy?

She rose quickly, threw on her robe, and hurried down the stairs. But by the time she reached the bottom, her panic had eased; surely the child had simply gotten out of bed in search of breakfast, or to watch TV, or simply to have a look around. In the kitchen Lacey found the girl sitting at the table, still in her pajamas, forking bites of toaster waffle into her mouth. Sister Claire was sitting at the head of the broad table, dressed in sweats from her morning jog through Overton Park, holding a steaming mug of coffee and reading the Commercial Appeal. Sister Claire wasn’t actually a sister yet, just a novitiate. The shoulders of her sweatshirt were dappled with rain; her face was moist and flushed.

She put the paper down and smiled at Lacey. “Good, you’re up. We’ve already had our breakfast, right, Amy?”

The little girl nodded, chewing. Before she’d joined the order, Sister Claire had sold houses in Seattle, and as Lacey took a place at the table, she saw what the sister had been reading: the real estate section. If Sister Arnette had seen this, she would have been annoyed, might even have given one of her impromptu speeches about the distractions of material life. But the clock on the stove said it was a little after eight; the other sisters would be next door at Mass. Lacey felt a stab of embarrassment. How could she have slept so late?

“I went to early services,” Claire said, as if answering her thoughts. Sister Claire often went to the 6:00 A.M. before her daily jog, which she referred to as a visit to “Our Lady of Endorphins.” Unlike the rest of the sisters, who had never been anything else, Claire had lived a whole life outside the order: been married, made money, owned things, like a condo and nice shoes and a Honda Accord. She hadn’t felt the call until she was in her late thirties and divorced from the man she once referred to as “the worst husband in the world.” Nobody knew the details except perhaps Sister Arnette, but Claire’s life was a source of wonder to Lacey. How was it possible for a person to have two lives, so very different from each other? Sometimes Claire would say something like “Those are cute shoes” or “The only real good hotel in Seattle is the Vintage Park,” and for a moment all the sisters would be stunned into a silence that was one part disapproval, one part envy. It was Claire who had gone to shop for Amy, the unstated implication being that she was the only one of them who really knew how to do this.

“If you hurry you can still make it to the eight o’clock,” Claire offered. Though of course it was too late; Claire’s real meaning, Lacey understood, was something else. “I can watch Amy.”

Lacey looked at the girl. Her hair was disordered from sleep, but her skin and eyes were bright, rested. Lacey ran the tips of her fingers through the girl’s bangs. “That’s very kind of you,” Lacey said. “Perhaps, today, just this once, because Amy is here—”

“Say no more,” Sister Claire said and, laughing, halted Lacey’s words with a hand. “I’ll cover for you.”

The looming day assembled in Lacey’s mind. Sitting at the table, she remembered her plan for the zoo. When did it open? What about the rain? It would be best, she thought, to be out of the house before the other sisters returned. Not only because they would wonder why she hadn’t come to Mass; they might also start to ask questions about Amy. The lie had worked so far, but Lacey felt its softness, like a floor of rotten boards beneath her feet.

When Amy had finished her waffles and a tall glass of milk, Lacey led her back upstairs and got her quickly into her clothes: a fresh pair of jeans, stiff with newness, and a T-shirt with the word SASSY stenciled on it, the letters outlined with sequins. Only Sister Claire would have possessed the courage to choose something like that. Sister Arnette wouldn’t like the shirt, not at all—if she saw it she’d probably sigh and shake her head as she always did, souring the air of the room—but Lacey knew the shirt was perfect, just the sort of thing a little girl would want to wear. The sequins made the shirt special, and surely that’s what God would want for a child like Amy: some happiness, however small. In the bathroom she wiped the syrup off Amy’s cheeks and brushed out her hair, and when this was done she dressed herself, in her usual pleated gray skirt and white shirt and veil. Outside, the rain had stopped; a warm, unhurried sun was gathering in the yard outside. The day would be hot, Lacey guessed, a blast of warmth sailing in from the south behind the cold front that had pushed rain over the house all night.

She had a little cash, enough for tickets and a treat, and the zoo, of course, was something they could walk to. They stepped outside, into air that had begun to swell with heat and the sweetness of wet grass. The bells of the church had begun to bong out the hour; Mass would be ending at any moment. She led Amy quickly through the garden gate, through the tart aroma of herbs, the rosemary and tarragon and basil that Sister Louise tended so carefully, into the park, where people were already gathering for the first warm day of spring, to taste the sun and feel it on their skin: young people with dogs and Frisbees, joggers plodding along the paths, families staking out shady tables and barbecue pits. The zoo stood at the north end of the park, flanked by a broad avenue that cleaved the neighborhood like a blade. On the far side, the big houses and wide, princely lawns of old Midtown were forgotten, replaced by shotgun shacks with broken-down porches and half-assembled cars melting into the packed-dirt yards. Young men floated up and down the streets like pigeons, roosting on this corner or that and then moving on, all of it benumbed with idleness and vaguely ominous. Lacey should have felt better about this neighborhood than she did, but the blacks who lived there were different from Lacey, who had never been poor, at least not in the same way. In Sierra Leone her father had worked for the ministry; her mother kept a car and driver for shopping trips to Freetown and the polo matches at the fairgrounds; one time they’d attended a party where the president himself had danced a waltz with her.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 584