Outcome (3 page)

So that was it. She had two options. Get to the city before the virus got to him. Or head to the mountains alone right now.

Seated, she turned to the window, surreptitiously placed one of the surgical masks over her face, and pulled her coat collar up around her nose. She leaned against the window and tried to sleep. A man coughed from up front, the noise wet and chunky, like two livers slapped together. Ellie startled. Her understanding crystallized. She was going to die. She was going to die for a man who wouldn't even answer her calls.

The plane touched down. She remained in her seat until the jet emptied of all but the old people and a man waiting for a wheelchair—again, she smiled at herself; she'd been breathing their air for two hours; as if keeping her distance from the other passengers would save her—then filed off. Inside the terminal, the windows were dark, the lights of planes winking from the tarmac. Her flight was delayed. She spoke with the woman at the boarding counter, fighting the anger swelling in her gut, forcing herself not to argue or draw attention, but she learned nothing.

She'd left her phone behind. Didn't want to make it too easy for them to track her down. She'd brought her backup laptop, though, and spent the next hour rereading her files on Chip. Nothing new since the last time she'd checked in on him a month ago. Still running with the ambulance. His bus. The girl was still in her uptown private school. Ellie rolled her eyes. How did he expect to afford to send her to college? Not that she needed to ask him. She'd heard variations of his line of thought a hundred different times. "Things will work out, Ellie. Just watch. Just wait."

Well, the world probably wouldn't outlast the month, so the girl's private school wasn't so impractical after all. But not because, as Chip would insist, the world had a way of giving you what you needed. Turned out they were both right, in their way, and that they were right for the worst possible reasons.

At 11 PM, her flight was canceled.

This time, she had no problem arguing loudly and bitterly with the impassive woman at the check-in counter, but it wasn't any good. It had been the night's last flight to New York. It was too late to puddle-jump to Portland and grab an alternate. Would she like to take the first flight in the morning?

What she really wanted to do was shoot the woman in the knee, jog outside into the fuel-smelling winds churned by the jets, and hop into the first Cessna she saw. It had been a couple years, but flying a plane was like riding a bike: once you got going, there was nothing to it.

Instead, Ellie retired to one of the terminal's low-slung black seats and fired up her laptop. She believed the machine was clean, and while Rawlings would no doubt know of her absence by now, if he were that determined, he had easier ways to track her down. She spoofed her IP anyway and surfed around the news networks for stories on the virus. Hardly anything. A quarantine in a hospital in Idaho. A handful of deaths in California and the Pacific Northwest, but nothing like the levels in Rawlings' report. Several cut-and-paste responses from low-level health officials. Hospital reports were clearly being filtered, scrubbed.

Or maybe it was the sheer speed of the thing: even Rawlings didn't believe the numbers. How could reporters—who had no numbers at all, just vague statements from health workers who themselves had no hard data at hand, no scope or scale of the outbreak—begin to glimpse the truth of what approached? She guessed it would be another two to four days before the networks caught up to what was happening right now. By the time they began, so hesitantly, to recommend their bland, useless, or unrealistic methods for avoiding the outbreak, it would be too late.

Then again, she was all but certain it already was.

As she snuggled into the terminal seat, attempting fruitlessly to find a position comfortable enough for her exhaustion to overpower the bite of the chair's arm into her ribs, she once more considered the idea this was all a mistake. She was normally so good at moving on, at cutting her losses, at dismissing the past in favor of a cold-eyed analysis of the present. That very skill had elevated her to her current position within the organization. But for whatever reason, she couldn't apply that skill to Chip. Through all the moves and all the years, all the boyfriends and e-dates, he stuck with her like beach tar on the sole of her foot.

She slept, woken a half dozen times by the cold, the chair's hard arm, her own dreams. Passengers trickled into the terminal. The windows grayed, showing dark green trees beyond the runways. At last, she boarded, pinching her surgical mask into place as she filed down the umbilical to the waiting jet.

On her way to her seat, she turned sideways past a man cramming his suitcase into the overhead. Hands above his head, he coughed; particulated spittle sprayed Ellie's ear. She spent the flight reminding herself that she was already dead, and so was Chip, and so was the girl. In this environment, death was the expected outcome. If she managed anything better, then top-notch work, commendations for all, but this was a feel-good mission, not a get-results trip.

Landing at LaGuardia always made her smile. The jet came in so low over the water you could nearly count the fish. There was always a moment when she thought this would be it, the pilot had finally missed his mark and was about to plunge them into the frigid waters of the East River. Then the strip appeared beneath them and the wheels bounced down and passengers reached for cell phones and coats and bags.

Again, she waited for everyone else to deplane before leaving. After the pristine chill of Seattle, the New York air tasted humid and polluted and warm. Carry-on in hand, Ellie walked to long-term parking, located her Honda, peeled off her latex gloves, and thumb-keyed the car keys out of the box welded to the undercarriage. Inside the car, she tugged on a fresh set of gloves. The windshield was coated in rain-spotted dust. She ran the wipers and pulled out from the airport. After the clarity of the West, the horizon looked sickly, nicotine-stained, a blurred border between the city and whatever lay beyond.

Traffic on the BQE to the Brooklyn Bridge was no better nor worse than the usual. Ellie hated driving, particularly in cities. She had a habit of taking every other driver's unsignaled lane change or blown red light personally, which meant she herself wound up driving in a perpetual state of amazed fury, incredulous that these people would so casually put her life at risk. It was maliciously negligent in a way that made her feel as if it wouldn't be so unreasonable to force them off the road, march them to the guardrail, and shoot them in the head.

She drove downtown, parked, took the key from the glove box, and retrieved her bag from the storage locker it had been sitting in for the last three years. She kneaded the fabric, felt her gun, and walked outside. She'd never really made a habit of observing general streetside sickness levels, leaving her with no reliable baseline for comparison, but a non-insubstantial percentage of pedestrians coughed into their hands or blew their noses and flicked Kleenex into the wire baskets at every corner. She pinched the nose-clamps on her surgical mask tight and got into the car. 

She headed east on Houston and up toward Alphabet City. The East Village looked more or less as she remembered it: four-story walkups above Ukrainian diners, narrow bodegas, and upscale dive bars. A more subdued scene than the towers and traffic of downtown proper, but still lively, thriving. The change between 2nd Ave and Avenue B was drastic and downscale. Broken streets. Shabby, project-looking apartments. She cruised past Tomkins Square, giving the eye to the jacketed old men standing around the benches like misplaced scarecrows. Chip had moved down in the world.

She parked around the block, doublechecked the simple text document she'd dumped all his info into, shouldered her bag, and walked back to his apartment.

He didn't answer the buzzer. Near the corner, a bodega worker hosed down the sidewalk, sluicing filth into the gutter. A woman with a stroller ambled in the opposite direction. Ellie reached into her bag and retrieved two thin metal prongs. The lock yielded in seconds.

She walked upstairs and knocked on his door. A TV played from the landing below, its voices muted and distorted like the adults in a Charlie Brown special. She knocked again, harder, keeping her eye on the peephole. It never winked.

His locks were no tougher than the one on the building's front door. The apartment was empty. It was mid-afternoon; he'd be at work, tending to the ill in the back of his ambulance. If he hadn't been exposed to the plague already, he would be soon enough. His daughter was out, too. Possibly on her way back from that uptown school.

Chip still had a landline by his bed. Ellie bugged it, walked downstairs, and moved the car from around the corner to just down the block. Time droned by. Cabs pulled into the curb, discharging fares. Young men with absurd beards biked toward the park. The squashed notes of a tuba played beneath the hum of traffic.

At 5:01, with the shadows long in the street and the temperature dropped to a breezy chill, she bought a coffee from the corner bodega, got a couple bucks in change, and used the payphone outside to call Chip's work. After BSing the receptionist, the woman informed her Chip had missed the day's shift. No, he hadn't explained why. Who exactly was calling again?

Ellie hung up, sighed through her nose, and dialed his cell. It went straight to voice mail. She made a face, dug out the girl's cell number, and called it, but it too went to messaging.

She hadn't anticipated this. Chip wasn't exactly a man about town. His work schedule might be erratic, but when it came to the kid, Ellie knew he was a gentle tyrant. The girl wasn't old enough for him to let her out by herself. Not this late. Not like him to miss work without notice, either. That was the sort of thing he'd feel disgraced by.

She ruled out the possibility he had fled from the disease. He had no way of knowing. More likely, the disease had already happened to him—or to the girl.

In that case, Ellie should drive up to the Adirondacks right now. Most agents would. But she had to know.

Speed had become more important than secrecy. Using one of her disposable cells, she called Vergens. He didn't pick up, but she expected that. She let it ring seven times, then called again, ringing five times, then called again, at which point he picked up.

"Ellie?" Vergens sounded more curious than worried.

"I need a cell location," she said. "Precise as you can make it."

"What's up? Where are you?"

"Waiting for you to track down that cell."

"Which will in turn tell me exactly where
you
are." His tone, as usual, was fundamentally unconcerned. He might have been telling Ellie her shoe was untied. "Since when was this something you couldn't do for yourself?"

She watched a woman in a long black coat walk a Great Dane down the steps of the apartment across the street. There were going to be a lot of dead dogs, too. Starved behind locked front doors.

"You're smart enough to figure that one out," she said. "Now will you run my number?"

"You're off leash!" Vergens sounded positively delighted. She fed him Chip's number. The girl's, too. His keyboard clattered. "Are you in trouble?"

"No more than anyone else."

"Listen to you. You leaving us for a new career in philosophy?"

She came very close to not telling him. If he acted on what she fed him, they could track it right back to her. Anyone else, she'd leave them to dangle. But of everyone, Vergens had always been there for her. She believed, without arrogance, that it was because the man was secretly in love with her, but reasons didn't matter. Actions did.

"Joe," she said, using his first name for the first time in years. "Listen. My reads. Do you trust them?"

"No," he said. "I
worship
them. You take the numbers and you waterboard them until they give up secrets they didn't know they had."

"Then as soon as you get me this address, leave. If you can help it, don't even go home. Go somewhere safe. Alone. And stay there."

He clicked more keys. "Ellie."

She could read his doubt as clear as the Tom Cruise billboard hanging over the corner. "You know the flu that's going around? The cough?"

"Wait a minute. Is that something of ours?"

"No. We don't know where it's from. And I don't think we ever will. The Rockies, Death Valley, McMurdo Station—get far out and stay out."

"You're serious, aren't you?" His tone shifted from cheerful apathy to a six-year-old asking about his cancerous cat. "Then what are you doing in New York?"

She looked up. "You got my addresses?"

"It's like an old hospital." He read her the address. "Uptown. Way, way uptown."

"That's Chip? What about the girl?"

"Same place."

"Anything else?"

"They haven't moved in several hours. Hey Ellie, you want me to keep tabs on 'em?"

She started the car. "For an hour? Then you have to get out. Promise me."

"Anything, Ellie."

She hung up. She felt a pang of guilt, but set it aside like an ornament from the mantel: a nice addition to the atmosphere of her emotional space, but ultimately useless. At the corner, she waited for the light to change before making her turn. New York was a no-right-on-red city. The last thing she needed was to be ticketed, to have her license inspected. It ought to pass the database, but you never knew.

She entered the stream of northbound traffic, watching every car around her, one eye on the sidewalks and intersections for overeager jaywalkers. Now that she had a specific destination, an endpoint—more accurately, a clear midpoint between now and the drive to the cabin upstate—the entire city took on the dangerous indifference of a bear trap. One ticket, one careless pedestrian, one little fender-bender, one long red light—every extra second between her and Chip was one more second for him to catch the virus. Her whole trip could be negated by a wobbly cyclist.

Even more carefully than normal, she drove through the glossy shopping centers of Chelsea, the imposing spires of Midtown, the stately peaks of the apartments alongside Central Park, the block housing of Harlem. Near the northern tip of Manhattan, she pulled into a lot fronting the Harlem River and got her binoculars from her bag. Across the street, a hospital stood in the darkness. A number of shiny black Suburbans sat in its lot. The hospital's lights illuminated men standing motionless beside its front and side doors. They wore no official uniforms and displayed no weapons, but through the binoculars, it was a simple thing to make out the bulge of holsters in their armpits.