Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (15 page)

“You seem to have been correct, Colonel,” Dr. Rudolph Gaines told us, stiffly, on the next conference call. “I am now suggesting, one and all, that we recommend to the president that he proclaim Barrow the nation’s first protocol four.”

Thirty-six hundred miles from Barrow, Alaska, the angry man sat in the second-floor study of his luxurious, log-sided country home, on a forested three-thousand-acre mountain property, watching Quonset hut one in Alaska via satellite. It was a crystal-clear view right down to magnified fresh polar bear tracks crossing the base; stars out, new snow reflecting prisms of light between huts. He saw the curving roof beneath which his two operatives sat, their voices encrypted and distorted so that any listener—if they’d managed to break in—would not know if men or women spoke.

The first voice, even modified, came across as tentative, fearful, tailing into a soft
wooooo
. “If it wasn’t for Rush, they would have called the first deaths a shooting. They wouldn’t have found rabies. It’s not fair!”

A fire roared in the big room, smelling of hot, popping resin. The angry man was fortyish, with a cherub’s pudgy cheeks and body, sloped shoulders, and thick chestnut hair. Black eyes. Soft mouth. Soft hands. Red silk robe. The plainest face in the world. Natural camouflage. Because of this mild appearance he’d been underestimated his whole life. Because of his intelligence, he’d used that to his advantage.

The second voice in his ear was lower, a rumble rising to an opera soprano’s note, earsplitting over the screwed up sound system. “If you would have let me infect him at the beginning, this wouldn’t have happened-d-d-d-d.”

“It’s not my fault . . . ault . . .” the first voice whined.

“Nothing ever is.” The second voice remained calm. It was the voice of a professional chewing over a problem. “The quarantine starts in an hour. Whatever we decide, it has to happen now.”

The angry man curbed his rage. He demanded of his listeners, “You understand what’s at stake?”

No answer! Had the satellite spun beyond range? The man was almost apoplectic. Had his communication system failed? No . . . no . . . just a delay, a traffic interruption above Earth, where messages whizzed through space; a phone scammer in Mumbai, tricking a retiree in Florida; a Chinese destroyer receiving orders as the ship maneuvered off the Philippines; a diplomat in Tokyo whispering endearments to a lover in Havana.

The first voice was back. “At stake? Many millions.”

“Millions?
Billions!
We’re on a deadline! You made a promise! You assured me!”

The roaring fire illuminated original oil paintings; American West motif, Remington buffalos, Bierstadt Yosemite, flatboat river men. The desk was Zairian mahogany, the carpet Italian, the rugs from Iran. A wall of leather-bound books featured works on strategy, military, and finance. Beyond open silk curtains, floodlights illuminated a crushed stone driveway, an armored Mercedes, and a private forest of pine and birch, the leaves brittle in October. Down the hall slept the angry man’s twenty-seven-year-old
trophy wife . . .
He’d heard older, jealous wives of colleagues whisper that term at last night’s cocktail party in the capital, a ninety-minute drive from here.

Stupid women go dry, lose the urge to have sex at forty and then blame men for getting it elsewhere. Now I understand why Moslem men have five wives.

The second voice—the professional—said, “He’s with his fiancée now, asleep. We hear their breathing. I know the combination of the lock on their door and—”

The first voice cut off the second. “Are you crazy? That would focus everything on
what he’s saying.
And you’d leave tracks in the snow!”

The angry man tried to ignore electronic interference, earsplitting over the German-made speakers, fucking things were supposed to be the best in the world. Krauts
,
he thought. They killed my great-grandfather.

He spat out rapid questions.

“You said he shares ideas with the fiancée?”

“Last night he told her what he wants to do next. They both know the idea. He’s figuring it out!”

“That major, Nakamura, does he know, too?”

“He’s been out at the campsite for the last day. He’s not aware of what Rush wants to try. And, sir, once the quarantine starts, it will be much harder to get to him. They’ll be bunking soldiers in all the huts.”

The angry man tried to ignore the hot sensation coursing through him; throat dry, fists clenched, temples throbbing—and he had an idea. “If you can’t reach him, what about
her
? Is Rush the kind who would lose focus? Fall apart? Or come at things harder?”

“He’s crazy about her. That’s for sure.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I’m not a mind reader, sir.”

“You will stop him or distract him! Do you hear!”

The angry man had grown up on the streets and learned early; when you have an enemy you hit hard, right away, with all you have. You don’t strategize or negotiate. You don’t whine. You don’t allow a modicum of thought in the foe as to the possibility of equality between you. But he’d permitted himself to start slowly in Barrow—and it had come back to haunt him. So he explained what he wanted now and the professional went quiet. The angry man heard:
Weeeee
. Then the pro said with some delicacy, negotiating, taking advantage, “Sir, once the quarantine begins, I’m stuck here.”

“Double.”

“Stuck with soldiers. No way out.”

“Triple.”

“If I get caught?”

“You’re supposed to be good.”

“Even the best get caught if you wait too long.”

The angry man swallowed the insult. His voice softened considerably. This was a tell. Anyone who knew him understood that you did not want his voice to go mild. It meant he’d left the red zone, where he generally resided, and entered a worse one, purple alert, DEFCON one.

“If you’re caught, I can probably get you out at some point,” he said.

“Even from military prison?”

“I said,
at some point
. But if you feel like you need to refuse, I understand.”

“I’ll do it,” the professional said quickly, understanding that he had pushed things too far.

The angry man slammed the phone down, stomped down the hall to his dozing wife.
Fucking bitch would sleep through a bomb
. Action usually made him feel better. He dragged her awake by her long blond hair. She’d not seen this rough side of him yet and she started screaming, which excited him, so he hit her a couple of times, but not in the face. Hell, she wanted money to shop every day? The art galleries? The vacations? Fine. He’d bought her, so to speak, and he’d get what he wanted now.

•   •   •

THE NIGHTMARE STARTED THE USUAL WAY BUT THEN THE FACES CHANGED.
I was in a tunnel carved into a cave, it’s high ceiling shielded by steel netting strung up top to contain—rock. I stepped forward, hyperaware, carbine in hands. I had trouble drawing in air because of the protective mask over my face and the heat in my ears, in my throat. My Marine squad advanced behind me, down, down, in hell’s direction. Blue smoke curled from air vents in rock. Alarms screeched. The cave exited into a hallway. The hallway had a lab. Inside were medical cabinets. Surgical instruments. Steel manacles fixed to operating tables. No people at first . . . but then . . .

Then the child-sized figure charged out of the smoke.

Iraq. In memory. Eddie and I were first lieutenants, dispatched from the main thrust of invasion, patrolling outlying villages, making sure they were clear of ambushers. We found nothing until our Humvees and armored carrier stumbled onto a brand-new highway in the middle of nowhere. It led to a ratty abandoned village, except, when we entered the huts, we found they were mock-ups, a false town, a trick to fool reconnaisance. In one hut we found an iron door set into the rocky side of a mountain. We blew open the iron door. It led down into the cave.

That brought us to Saddam’s hidden lab.

As the child form rushed at me, through dream smoke, I knew what was coming next and I filled with dread. The dream came sporadically. That day changed my life and sent Eddie and me to med school on the Marine dime, made us hunters of different kinds of deadly weapons, the kind you can’t see, that float in air, seep into lungs, take a healthy person and twist them into a shrieking, burnt-up furnace. That rewires evolution and turns ten million years of anatomical progress into a contagious degenerating mush.

The figures that usually burst through the smoke in my dream were monkeys, with pink faces and pink hands, as they’d had on that day in real life. Infected monkeys. But tonight they had human faces. I saw Kelley and Ted, Cathy and Clay, furried bodies, friends’ eyes, and the alarms ringing, as they shrieked like animals, rushing to attack.

My hands rose by themselves. I squeezed the trigger. I screamed as bullets made my friends dance and fall back, their furry chests blossoming red.

“Joe! Get up!” Karen was shaking me.

I opened my eyes.

The red digits on the nightstand read 3:50
A.M.

“Christ.” My body was soaked with sweat, and I smelled ammonia. Sweat. Nightmare. Me.

“The dream, right, honey? The monkeys?”

She’d been with me once before when it happened, on a vacation. Now I lay inside a cone of night-table light. I still saw Kelley’s face, blowing apart. I went into the bathroom and washed my face, looked at myself in the mirror. Did the light bother me? Did it hurt? I saw blanched skin, saw a man who had just shot his friends. A man who had not answered his phone when Kelley tried to reach him.

“Why them?” I asked when I came out. Rhetorical question. Either Karen or I uttered these words ten times a day.

“It’s not your fault, Joe. If you’d answered that phone, nothing would be different.”

“People have dreams for reasons.”

“Joe. You take things on. That’s the reason.”

“Maybe. Okay. I do. But maybe there’s more. Maybe we’ve all been trying to figure this out the wrong way.”

Wide awake now, we weren’t going back to sleep. She looked for the coffee in the kitchenette. “Meaning what?”

I sat at our little table and saw the white wall as a blank canvas and filled it with the dream to help me think. Dreams are clues. They’re always clues of
something
. The problem is figuring out what they mean. You think a dream means you should quit your job. But it means you should divorce your wife. You think a dream means you need to see the dentist. But deep inside, where you don’t want to look, you fear you have cancer.

“Karen, I said it last night. What if Clay Qaqulik was right from the beginning? What if this all goes back to someone trying to stop the Harmons’ work?”

She had a lovely frown, the way it deepened the gray in her eyes, softened it, added amber. Intensity became her. When you’re in love, even musculature becomes mystery, even at moments like these. “Joe, you’re thinking that someone infected them on purpose?”

“I’m just saying, maybe the way to crack this isn’t to track the outbreak, or analyze the bug. We go back to Clay. Restart
his
investigation. See? And we finish what Ted and Cathy started, do their work, complete their project. Maybe there’s a consequence of their work that no one is seeing. If you understand the consequence, you understand what is going on.”

Her silver hair swooshed back and forth. “Algae? How would algae relate? Anyway, if it was intentional, murder, why kill people in town, too, who had nothing to do with the Harmons? Who didn’t even know the Harmons? Joe, you’re overthinking.”

“If it’s contagious, it got out after.”

“Murder, Joe? Listen to what you’re saying!”

“People have been trying to weaponize rabies for three hundred years.”

“You’re still halfway in your dream, Joe.”

“Good. Helps me think.”

“But why murder someone by using rabies?”

“
Because
no one would think it was intentional
. Look, maybe it’s not contagious. Contagious is logical but it’s also possible that someone wants it to look that way! See what I mean? So many explanations are still possible.”

“You’re doing mind tricks on yourself.”

“All the time.”

“Give yourself time to wake up.”

“I’m up. That’s the point.”

She cocked her head. She smiled, but not with humor. “Well, Colonel, this would be one hell of a time to decide it’s
not
contagious. Listen!”

I heard the droning—the big engines and propellers overhead—and went still. I moved the curtain aside, looked out. Was someone there, walking toward our hut in the snow?

No. My vision must have played a trick on me. No one was there. Lights flicked on in the Longhorn hut.

I looked up. The C-130 troop carriers, blotting out constellations, looked fearsome. Karen switched on the TV. I saw snow on screen and heard static. The satellite embargo must have begun. Barrow was closed off.

“You don’t look surprised. So you knew, too,” Karen said, and sighed. “I figured you knew. They might need me on the sub. They called last night.”

We stared at each other. I’d been warned not to tell her by Wayne Homza. She’d been warned not to tell me by Electric Boat. So at precisely the moment when man and woman need each other, probably reached for each other across the city, we’d been told to shut out our partners, to link ourselves to duty over love.

We dressed swiftly, warmly. The thermometer outside read twenty-seven degrees. A dusting of snow covered the base, and parachutes bloomed above. We took go-cups filled with hot, sugar-sweetened Folgers.

I started up the Ford, the heater roaring, Karen snug beside me. Our pathetic rebellion against the government. No using seat belts today. Mikael Grandy and Dr. Alan McDougal were exiting their huts, too. They looked up at the sky.

“Someone should have told Merlin. Or the mayor,” Karen said.

At four
A.M.
, a few people were up normally, restaurant owners heading out to prepare breakfasts, hunters getting an early start on the day. More lights flickered in homes as we bounced toward the airport. People emerging from houses, staring at the sky, not yet understanding. Lights glowed inside the police station, where detectives on tonight’s rotation probably stared at corkboards, at results of investigation that had left us helpless; lines of infection stretching from homes to garages to airport; as we interviewed family, friends, and neighbors, filling in schedules, looking for intersection points, checking refrigerators for similar products, testing blood.