Cold Silence (7 page)

“Hassan, what's going on out there?”

“I think that you are finished, Doctor. Do you know for sure what has happened here?”

“How can I know that yet?”

“You took many photographs? Many samples?”

“Yes.”

“You will now leave the compound. You will bring your samples and photos. You will walk twenty feet toward us and then you will stop and strip.”

“Hassan, I—”

“Don't interrupt! Just listen!”

I heard, through my earpiece, the agitated sounds of men arguing. I heard Hassan snapping back something in Somali. I had no idea what it was, but I did have a feeling that the argument concerned the fate of Eddie and me.

Hassan was back. “Do this now, Dr. Rush.”

Eddie mouthed,
Uh-oh.

Hassan said soothingly, “You are in no danger yet. I promise this. But you will please do what I say.”

There was really no choice. Eddie mouthed,
Yeah, our pal
, as we left the tent, walked past Lionel Nash, in the rain, and toward the opening in the thorn tree barrier
.
We both carried steel sample cases. We left all our drugs there. These people would need them.

Lionel had helped out until the end, and his reserves of strength astounded me. Understanding what was about to happen, the former Marine half straightened and saluted.

“Semper fi, sir,” said Lionel.

“Semper fi, Lionel.”

The rain made scratchy noises on my biosuit. My visor fogged. The respirator gurgled. At fifty yards between us, Hassan stepped out of the ragged circle of militia fighters and ordered us to halt.

“Hoods off,” Hassan ordered. “I want to make sure it is you
before I let you go. That you did not trade places with someone else.”

The fresh air smelled of alkaline earth and saltwater and camel dung, of sweat and fresh rain and wet palm trees.

“Strip. Everything. Now. But keep the microphones on.”

Hassan stood alone, before his fighters, hand on the butt of his gun. Then a militia man ran up to him and handed him something black, and I froze. But it was not a gun, I saw as he raised the object to his face. It was binoculars.

So! He wanted to see my face close up as we talked. Hassan would be too far away for me to see his features. In his binoculars, I'd be inches away. He could study my eyes.

Hassan said, “I do not think you have previous knowledge of this thing, Doctor.”

“Thank you.”

He was making a decision. He said, “You have your samples and your photos. To bring back.”

“Hassan,” I said, my heartbeat rising, “don't hurt them.”

“I will not.”

“That's your brother in there, you said. Your own brother.
Your people, Hassan.
”

“You think I don't know that, Dr. Rush?”

I pleaded as the rain intensified, “All I'm asking for is a little time. Another plane lands. You keep your distance. You can't be infected. The doctors wear protective suits and bring the right medicines. They keep the sick from you. They help your brother. For God's sake—”

He cut me off. “‘For God's sake'? This is an interesting notion. You think I do not believe in a God?”

“I didn't say that.”

“You think I am a barbarian. Life is cheap in Africa. Those
Africans, those barbaric Somalis, have no respect for the lives of women and men. Is that it?”

“That's not it.” But he was right partially, and I was ashamed.

“West Africa, Doctor. Ebola breaks out. A fatal disease. We can cure it, you doctors say. We take
precautions
. We
know
what we're doing, you say. Ebola acts
this
way. It acts
that
way. It is a known quantity. And then suddenly a thousand are dead. And then four thousand. And then ten. And you doctors apologize because you did not really know at all, and you blame the unclean primitive Africans. Well, there are a thousand healthy people a few miles away from here. My people.”

I said nothing. I stood in the heat and rain and felt drops running down my scalp and forehead and into my eyes.

“Hassan the clan leader. Hassan and his cruel, harsh men. Hassan who thinks life means nothing. By the way, not everyone here agrees with my decision. They do not want to even let you go. You see?”

“At least let me get the healthy ones out of here.”

No answer.

“You can't do this.”

“Go,” he said gently. “Go back to the plane. Fly away and tell them we didn't start it. That's all you have to do. I'll do what is necessary. I'll do the rest. Haven't you figured out yet why I made you strip? I want to make sure you don't carry out contagion on your clothes.”

The guns seemed to lower, as if the metal itself knew there would be no carnage yet. The stillness was profound. We stripped and, naked, sluiced by rain, trudged back to the shot-up Land Rover. We needed to figure out what had happened, to understand this thing. Nakedness suited our condition. We were devoid of power in this particular hell.

Eddie said, “I don't want to leave, One.”

Hassan's voice replied, “I cannot control them for long. But it is
up to you. That is the power of God. To offer men choices. Drive away while you are safe.”

Eddie mouthed,
Hell.

Hassan watched our lips in his binoculars.

“Just go,” he said.

And thirty minutes later I watched our gape-mouthed pilot stare at our nakedness as we climbed into the plane and donned the clothes we'd discarded when we arrived. “Take off and circle back,” I told the pilot. “Stay high.”

Risky, but I have to see what he's going to do.

We rolled down the dirt runway, to the ululations of the Somali women, who had turned away from our nakedness. They were showing grief, I knew now, timeless, human grief for the dead. The plane took to the air as I saw the first wispy spirals coming from the south. Then the smoke became a black column. We banked toward the research camp until I saw exactly what was happening.

“Flame throwers,” breathed Eddie, horrified.

Maybe they'd used the guns first. I hoped so. It would have been quicker and merciful. We'd been too far away to hear shots. But either way they were finishing it with flaming gasoline. Skinny militia fighters with canisters on their backs had circled the compound. Burning gasoline-covered tents and corpses, bonfiring the thorn tree barrier, creating heat so profound it convoluted the air and made our plane bounce. Orange flame spiraled toward heaven.

“Go back to the base,” I told the pilot.

“This is the worst thing I ever saw,” said Eddie.

We did not speak for a while. We couldn't. We kept seeing that fire in our heads. But at least we had samples. We had saved nail clippings and skin and blood from those who were now ashes. I forwarded the photos to D.C. I could only hope that, back at the base, our samples would give answers. And that the thing we'd just encountered was local, not contagious. A chemical. A gas. A freak accident.

We never reached the base, though.

Because fifteen minutes later, as we crossed back into Kenya, it got worse again, when the sat call came through.

“We're diverting you, Joe,” the admiral told us. “The State Department long-range Gulf Stream will meet you at Moi, in Nairobi. Those photos were awful.”

“It's in Israel?” I asked, remembering the words I'd heard before, about Galilee, from the Situation Room. “It's spread? It's out already?”

There was shocked silence from the line, and I thought I felt raw emotion over space, bouncing up from the capital, gliding past burnt-up stars, directed back toward our pitching plane. “Israel, Joe? Why did you ask about Israel?”

“Because we heard you over the line earlier when you said there was a problem in Galilee.”

The admiral said quietly, “The audio was on?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Christ, those technical guys! Well, you're right, Joe. It
is
in Galilee. You heard correctly. But not Galilee, Israel. Come home. It's in Galilee, Nevada,” he said. “By the way, how are you two feeling?”

“Us?” said Eddie.

“Any tingling in your fingers?” the admiral asked, sounding
concerned.

The animals went crazy when Harlan turned on the light, emitting
high-pitched cries of panic, clawing up against their wire mesh cages, bumping into each other in terror, staring out at him with tiny glazed eyes. He tried to soothe away their fear as they skittered and screamed. Normally, when calm, they sounded like cooing babies. Now they sounded like something from another world.

—Shhh. Shhh. I'm not going to hurt you.

It didn't work, though. They recognized him, or rather, anything with two legs meant trouble, and they understood in the recesses of their primitive neuron passageways that even if they escaped pain at this particular moment, nothing good would come from association with him. Those things in the cages had brains the size of walnuts, DNA fifty million years old. Any analytical effort of which the smartest one—the Einstein of these creatures—might be capable might, at best, equal the thought power of a lumbering rhinoceros. They couldn't add one plus one. The concept of “tomorrow” was beyond them. They'd stare at the red telephone as if it
were a rock. But when it came to pain, they knew they were in trouble and their cage floors were creamy masses of piss and shit and emitted an acidic odor that took him back to the swamps where he'd grown up, hunted alligators and feral hogs, learned the truth about pain, trust, and the nature of life. It seemed like ten thousand years ago. He was forty-nine.

—Calm down, you little guys!

This time of night, 12
A.M.
, he was alone in the big lab two stories beneath the ground, the only one permitted access. Red light on. Air control system humming over the whimpering noises. Satellite shots of Jerusalem blown up on the walls; and close-ups from the old walled city; a narrow footpath, Via Dolorosa, “the way of suffering,” where Jesus walked to his crucifixion; the golden Dome of the Rock, from where Mohammed ascended on his white steed Baraq to heaven, to converse with God. And only a few hundred yards away, the site of Solomon's Temple, where the Ark of the Covenant, given to Moses, came to rest for the Jews.

One square mile, Harlan thought, filled with joy. Remove that mile of earth, and two thousand years of human history—its crossroads, its major figures, its legends and lies and consequences—would be different. Nothing . . . not countries, not customs, not even science and aspiration would be the same.

Back to work.

Abutting the corner dissection area was a holding cell, now empty, and a top-of-the-line Bosch steel freezer, which required a four-digit combination to enter. He walked in and the cold hit him. He felt himself being watched on closed circuit feed by the night duty guards in the computer center, where the tech team sent out tweets, feeds, e-mails, and alerts. It was twenty-five degrees in here. His breath frosted as he stamped to keep warm, scanned the racks of medicines and blood and vials containing ground-up bits of animal intestine, brain, arterial scrapings. Other shelves were piled with supply cartons, blue stickers for
stuff to be donated, yellow for vital, purple for transport over the coming weeks.

—Ah, there you are!

He took five small stoppered glass bottles filled with fluid the color of ten-year-old Dewar's Scotch, his father's old preferred drink, rocket fuel for paternal emotion at 2
A.M.
From a cardboard box he removed twenty-one clean, freshly wrapped syringes in crinkly cellophane. He arranged the bottles on a silver tray in two circles, outer bottles for newbies, inner for everyone else. He was glad to leave the freezer, because he had always hated cold, even growing up. Unfortunately his orders had taken him here, to a cold place.

Now he stopped as a new sound hit him. A harsh ringing from the red phone on the computer table, amid the open, glowing Dells. All other phones were black.

It's him, Harlan thought.

He broke out in a sweat. He did not want to pick up the phone. His happiness had evaporated. Everyone fears something and Harlan was terrified of the thing on the other end of the phone. But he answered and heard the dreaded voice, rumbly, a master's voice, soft as static, a voice that sounded merely curious on the surface but held—he knew from experience—a vast torment beneath.

“Any news from Africa, Harlan?”

“Not yet but any minute. I'm sure of it.”

“You told me—ASSURED me—that you'd arrange things so it looks like everything started in Africa.”

“I did. I did. I swear it. It will!”

“You know what your problem is, Harlan? You're too nice. Too easy on your people. You haven't pushed your message with them. I'm disappointed in you.”

“My people will come through. I promise.”

“No one is sure of the future.”

“I didn't make a mistake.”

A pause, a long pause, and Harlan felt his pulse thicken in his throat. He smelled sour sweat. Then the voice said, quite mildly, “I hope so, Harlan.”

The connection went dead. He heard the buzzing on the line as accusation. The headache began as a small pressure in his temples. The sweat rolled from his armpits down his rib cage and collected by his belly, above his belt. He told himself to calm down, that the void of news was a glitch. Satellite delay. It had to be. Hell, Somalia was a primitive hell. You couldn't expect information to leach out of there with the same speed at which it traveled everywhere else in the modern world.

He spoke to himself out loud, to calm himself.

“Keep to the schedule. You have a job to do right now. You need to finish by one
A.M.
! You need to keep to the plan.”

—

A twelve-foot-long staircase brought him topside, through the well-lit gouged-out rock tunnel and into the farmhouse, 165 years old . . . stone foundation, Cold War–era overstuffed furniture, granite fireplace, and low, heavily beamed ceilings for tough hill winters. The house was deserted except for him. He was the only one permitted inside between midnight and 6
A.M.
He walked out onto the big wooden porch, away from the inside cameras, but in full view of the ones in the moosewood maples, oak, pine, and black birch trees. The men in the guard shack would be watching. They'd see a white man who had lost little to middle age except hair, a lean, spry figure, slightly taller than average, fringe bald at the top, with close-shorn sideburns, well trimmed and flared at the bottom, and a ruddy, open face that was slightly askew in a way that made him seem likable. His aura of knowledge and forgiveness marked him as special. An uncle. A beloved teacher.

He'd ordered his people to blend in with the locals, so all of them,
like him, wore rural clothes—faded blue jeans, red-and-black-checked flannel shirts, long underwear, and Timberland boots. One green eye sat a fraction lower than the other. His goatee was white on gray and reddened his thin lips. He was the only one permitted to wear facial hair, or to wear a watch, the only one allowed to move in a clockwise manner across campus, and now he carefully carried the tray along shoveled paths, past foot-high snow and beneath a blanket of North American stars and past small wooden buildings that would look, to any spy satellite above tonight, like a normal “barn” and “chicken house” and “stable” and “fruit cellar.”

At one time they had been those things, housing nothing worse than canned peaches or whinnying geldings or masses of docile poultry.

But they were not those things anymore.

Now the old stable was a barracks.

The moon was a bright sickle shape over the forest surrounding the ninety-acre compound, with its trout pond, long paved driveway, cornfield and apple orchard, and two-story warehouses, stocked with food, guns, and explosives. The January breeze brought the smells of fresh snow and pine smoke, barn mulch and winter mist and farm animals: goats, chickens, guard dogs, llamas.

His goal was the old Quaker era—1755—meeting house, on a two-acre lot that had been added onto the original purchase of the property by the Defense Department. It was a one-story building, bricked over, 1950s style, new slate roof, stovepipe chimney, and lights blazing inside. He saw, silhouetted in a large ground-floor window, a single delighted face watching him approach. Then more faces. Happy ones. Black and white, coffee colored and Asian.

Men. Women. Some as young as nineteen. Some as old as seventy-four. No children allowed in the meeting house. No pets allowed. No smoking. No alcohol, except on holidays.

Someone in there shouted, “Here he comes!”

They sang to Harlan, “He's here! He's here! He's here!”

—

“Mr. Maas?” interrupted a voice behind him before he could enter. He whirled. Nobody had been there a moment before. Orrin Sykes stood there now, bundled against the cold, an M4 over his shoulder.

Harlan halted on the steps, breath catching, but Sykes's eyes were properly respectful, semiaverted, and even slightly cast down. Sykes had done well in Florida. Maas had not realized the force inside the man when he'd first arrived. Sykes's quietness came across as shy anonymity. His ordinary looks gave no hint of the extraordinary violence inside, and the intelligence enabling him to carry it out. He could not be intimidated by anything except his own priorities. Sykes decided what he feared, and he had put Maas's displeasure at the top of his list.

Sykes, in fact, was the most dangerous human that Maas had ever met. He was in charge of security tonight.

The way he moved, if Sykes had been a sound, Harlan thought, he'd be a whisper. Respectful, though. Hair cut short to the skull, prescribed length, shirt tucked in the required way, right tail over left, to cover genitals. Orrin smelled of sheepskin coat, lube oil, freshly laundered jeans, and Juicy Fruit gum, which he chewed incessantly when on guard.

Maas assumed his benevolent face. “Of course. Ask anything anytime, Orrin.”

“Have we heard from Africa?”

Maas needed all his willpower to suppress the flood of rage that seized him.

“Of course! I was just on the red line and we're good.”

Sykes looked relieved.

“I never doubted, sir. I mean, Harlan.”

“Ah, but you did doubt, just a little, eh?”

Sykes reddened. “I need to work on that.”

Harlan patted the man's shoulder. It was like touching granite.
“Everyone has a past, Orrin. The point is to learn from it. Everyone has doubts. But we use them and don't let them slow us down. You have a gift. You are valuable. There's a reason you have your skills.”

“Thank you.”

“So don't worry because there's absolutely nothing to be concerned about tonight, unless,” he said, allowing his eyes to rove the skies, and woods outside the fence, and razor wire, “we get a few you-know-who's out there. They're always looking for us.”

Orrin straightened. “I have seven men on the wire, and the dogs.”

“Intruder could look like a neighbor. Lost tourist.”

“Like the two who claimed to be hikers last month. But after a while,” Orrin said, showing something different in his eyes, “they told the truth.”

“Orrin, we're on the cusp here, so incredibly close. Days maybe. And once it takes off, well . . .”

Tears of emotion appeared in Orrin's eyes.

“Seems like a dream, Harlan.”

“I'll need you to go out again. To Washington.”

“An honor, sir.”

“Didn't I ask you not to call me that?”

“You saved my life, Harlan.”

“Thank yourself, Orrin, not me.”

—

Harlan Maas walked down the center aisle in the old Quaker meeting house, past the gauntlet of smiling faces—living ones atop people sitting on benches—and less happy visages frozen in the hodgepodge of real paintings and framed magazine cutouts on the walls, some original work as old as five hundred years, other art a month old. The paint cracked and thick. Why, that top-left piece, the full-face visage of the sick man from the Greek island of Calidon, had to be worth half a million. The art magazine shot of Rembrandt's man in a turban was worth a penny, it was just a page, but it made the point all the same.

An art thief would clean up here, if he ever got in, and managed to get out.

“Any word from Africa, Harlan?”

“We're good to go, folks!”

Many faces in the illustrations seemed modern and recognizable, yet the bodies were clad in medieval clothes. No zippers. No buttons. The visages might be the same ones you'd see in the vegetable aisle at Walmart. Same DNA. Others were twisted and tortured. Men with beaks. Women with the heads of chickens. A walled village, burning. Lurid stuff, especially in the plain setting of a Quaker meeting house.