The Hatching: A Novel (23 page)

If it had been anybody else going full sprint toward the Oval Office, he would have been, at the very least, tackled and pinned to the ground, but the agents on duty knew Manny, and they were alarmed by his alarm. He was already sweating and out of breath, a cell phone in each hand and trying to talk on both at the same time. He broke off his conversations to tell the agents and Steph’s bodywoman—political jargon for her personal assistant—to clear the room, but Steph barely glanced at Manny.

The office was crowded. Two congressmen with seven or eight high-rolling donors, a young man who looked familiar to Manny, maybe an actor or singer, and several overwhelmed-looking parents chaperoning a quartet of Girl Scouts in full uniform. Steph, as always, under control, finished the grip and grin, leaning over and putting her arms around the Girl Scouts, grinning on cue for the
poof
of the camera flash. And then a quick thank-you, the full smile, and stepping back so the handlers could get everybody out.
Thirty seconds from the time he entered the room. The woman was a pro. Manny hadn’t even caught his breath yet when the office was empty.

As soon as the doors were closed, Steph’s smile dropped. “The Chinese?”

“No. India. Alex and Ben should be here any minute. Billy’s on his way.” Both of his cell phones started ringing at the same time, but he let them go.

“India? Shit. Has Pakistan retaliated?”

Manny looked at her for a second, confused, and then shook his head. It was an obvious conclusion for Stephanie. India and Pakistan had been at war or on the verge since the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. One of those brilliant British ideas, the partition of India. There hadn’t been an outright conflict in a while, but both states were nuclear, and some years the governments were more stable than others. Right now, neither country was exactly led by a group of levelheaded people. But they had a playbook for hostilities between India and Pakistan. Scenarios sketched out by analysts. Backup plans and contingencies and coordinated lines of communication. Guns and bombs and jets and escalation were all things they had planned for. But they hadn’t planned for this.

“No. Not Pakistan. Think China.”

“China?”

“The fucking spiders.”

“Okay,” she said. “How bad is it?” No hesitation. No disbelief. Just a need for information.

That was one of the things Manny liked about Steph, one of the reasons he’d pushed her to go for it. Because, despite all his political manipulation, despite his thinking of politics as a game, despite his ability to read a poll and spin a message, despite the way he could work a phone and twist arms and his willingness
to ruin somebody’s life if they didn’t deliver a vote, he was still a bit of a romantic. A realist, but a romantic one. And he believed in the idea of the president of the United States of America. He believed the president had to be the one to step up, that most of the time it didn’t matter who was sitting in the hot seat, but those few times, those once-in-a-generation moments, it mattered, and with Steph sitting in the chair, with Steph’s finger on the button, he knew she’d make the right decision. She had that knack of filtering out the noise, of letting go of distractions and cutting to the core, and as soon as she heard him say “spiders” she did the math. China. Nukes. Henderson’s body in Minnesota. And now India. She wasn’t going to waste her time thinking that it couldn’t be possible, and she wasn’t going to dither.

Something wicked this way comes, Manny thought. Any time for hesitation was gone.

“Manny, how bad?” she asked again.

“Bad,” he said. “It’s on television. NBC, but I think everybody’s going to pick it up soon.” He walked her out of the Oval Office and into the President’s Study, where she did most of her real work. An aide looked up and Manny asked her for some Diet Cokes and to make sure that Alex, Ben, and Billy were brought in immediately.

He picked the remote control up from the coffee table and turned the television on. Or, he tried to. After a few pointless jabs at the power button, Steph took it out of his hand. “Seriously, Manny? You can’t work a remote?” She got the television on and flipped it to NBC. They were playing the video in a loop: people running and screaming, then the black flood coming out the doors.

After about thirty seconds, she turned her back to the television.

“That’s it?” Manny said. “You don’t want to watch more?”

“Is there more to watch?”

“Not really.”

“So let’s get moving. And Manny?”

“Yeah?”

“Call your wife.”

Manny couldn’t stop himself. “Ex.”

Steph waved her hand at him in frustration. “Whatever. Don’t be an asshole.”

“Very presidential.”

“Manny, how about you go f—”

Steph stopped herself as the door opened. Alex Harris didn’t bother coming all the way into the room. She looked at Steph and then Manny. “I think we’re past the point of us sitting in the President’s Study and chatting,” Alex said. “Ben’s already down in the Situation Room, and I went ahead and called everybody in.”

“Come on, Alex, rein it in,” Manny said. First one and then the other phone in his pocket started buzzing again. And those were the phones he handled himself. His aide must have been getting slammed. “The press is going to sniff this out and have a field day with us overreacting.”

“Grow up, Manny,” Alex said. “We’re past that. The press is going to have a field day if we don’t start overreacting. You want to think politics, think 9/11.”

“Pardon me?” Manny said. “Are you saying this is terrorism?”

“No. What I’m saying is if we don’t do something right away, Steph is going to look a hell of a lot worse than Bush did reading about a goddamned goat while planes flew into skyscrapers. You want to worry about how this looks to the press, well, those are the optics you need to worry about, Manny. Not some journalists figuring out we’re moving into crisis mode.” She took a step into the room and reached out to touch Stephanie’s arm. “Because you better believe we’re moving into crisis mode, Madam President.
When we were looking at China we figured we could treat this like the flu or any other pandemic, right? Quarantines and using the National Guard to help out in areas particularly hard hit. And as with the flu or any other pandemic, we figured we’d see it coming.”

Alex took a deep breath and then turned back toward the door. “So, Manny, you can worry about the press all you want, but I’m worried about people dying. Come on. Let’s go, Manny. Situation Room.” Manny followed, not because he was summoned, but because he realized Alex was talking as much to the president as she was to him. And Alex was not that kind of person. Alex was well past caring about where her career ended up—she’d hinted about maybe an ambassadorship to Italy after she stepped down as national security advisor, because she was done with real politics after this—but she cared about the office of the president of the United States of America, and if Alex was basically calling the president in, it meant she was worried. Alex kept talking as they walked. “We figured we’d see it coming. Well, it’s not coming. It’s come. That’s the takeaway from India and China. They’ve got it, and they are already overwhelmed. Best-case scenario is it’s not already here and we can shut down flights and do our best to lock the country down. If it’s an overreaction, we’ll take a hit in the press.” Manny started to speak, but Alex kept talking. “Not my problem, Manny, and you can figure it out later, but Steph, Madam President, if I’m your national security advisor, I’m advising you to understand that if this is bad enough to get the Chinese dropping nuclear weapons and now it’s in India, we aren’t overreacting.”

Alex stopped walking and turned to look Steph and Manny full in the face. “I don’t think this is an ‘if’ situation anymore. I think it’s a ‘when’ kind of thing, and we’re only buying ourselves time until it hits our shores.”

A
gent Mike Rich wouldn’t have minded a few extra days in Washington if it had meant a chance to maybe take that scientist out to dinner. The hotel the agency had gotten for him was crappy, he hadn’t slept a wink, and he wasn’t crazy about the spiders, but Professor Guyer was a good-looking woman. She was tall enough to look him in the eye and had that lean, athletic look he favored. There was something weird going on there with her relationship to the president’s chief of staff, a schlumpy schlub of a man who nevertheless seemed pretty confident, but hell, there was something weird going on with everything. At the beginning of the week he was worried about homegrown Aryans and meth and drugs, and now suddenly it was cannibalistic spiders and President Stephanie Pilgrim and strict orders to keep his mouth shut. Wait. Cannibalistic? Was that right? Wouldn’t that mean they only ate one another? Were they cannibals if they ate humans instead of other spiders? Fuck it, Mike thought, it didn’t matter. What mattered was it was going to be a while before he could sleep without having nightmares.

He’d tried to sleep on the plane. Economy all the way home. They’d flown him to DC on a government jet and sent him back to Minneapolis commercial. He’d sort of been hoping he’d get a
first-class upgrade, but nope. That was the federal government for you. He’d tried closing his eyes anyway, leaning against the window and letting the drone of the motor vibrate him to sleep, but whenever he’d get close to actually drifting off he’d imagine the feel of something crawling on him. His leg. His arm. The back of his neck. After the third jump of adrenaline, the third time he started swatting at himself, he decided it was better to just call it a day and watch some television. Not a comfortable trip.

He waited until the plane was mostly cleared out before he made his way up the aisle from near the back. He didn’t have any luggage. The director had made it clear he was expected in Washington immediately, with “immediately” being code for “If you stop to pack luggage, you will find yourself reassigned somewhere unpleasant.” Mike did take the time to have his hand stitched and bandaged and to put on a new suit that didn’t have blood or puke on it, but all he was traveling with was his wallet, his cell phone, which was dead because he hadn’t brought a charger, his identification, and his Glock. The gun was a perk of working for the agency. They still wouldn’t let him bring a bottle of water through security, but the Glock wasn’t a problem. He wished he had taken the extra minute to grab his shoulder holster instead of his belt holster. A shoulder holster did a much better job of keeping his gun hidden, even if it was shitty for any real fieldwork. The holsters were slow to draw, and when you did draw, it was hard not to unintentionally put somebody in the path of the barrel as you moved it to where you were going. They looked undeniably cool, though. He kind of wished he’d been wearing one in that professor’s lab. His suit wasn’t much, a shiny Men’s BusinessDress special, but with his jacket off and a shoulder holster, he would have looked good. He did push-ups and chin-ups for a reason. But no. Instead, he was back in Minneapolis, getting off a plane after going nonstop for three days, the holster on his hip
sitting against a patch of sweat. He’d showered at the hotel, but a change of clothes was in his near future.

He could hear the buzz of voices before he reached the end of the tunnel, but it wasn’t until he popped out into the terminal that he realized there was something wrong. The normal unpleasantness of an airport was turned up. Way up. Instead of the boarding-area stasis of families clustered together in boredom, middle-aged consultants who thought they were important enough to warrant three seats when there weren’t enough to go around, harried parents with car seats and juice boxes, instead of all that, there was a sense of mutiny. Crowds were clustered around the airline desks at the gates, a jabbering mix of yelling and pointing here, small groups of people crying there. More worrisome was that the people freaking out were only a small minority. The rest of the people were engaged in what looked like a mass exodus. A dispirited mass exodus, but a mass exodus all the same.

This, he thought, was what 9/11 must have been like.

Mike saw a uniformed TSA agent making like a traffic cop, and he stepped over to the young man, giving a flash of his ID. “Just got off a flight and my phone is deader than dead. What’s the ruckus?”

“No ruckus. Flights are canceled.”

“This is all just for a few canceled flights?”

The TSA agent stared at Mike with what looked suspiciously like a smirk. For a second, Mike indulged in the fantasy of popping the kid a quick one in the nose. It was a nice fantasy, but unwise.

“It’s not a few canceled flights. It’s all of them.”

“All of them?”

“Yep. Every flight.”

“Every flight from Minneapolis has been canceled?”

This time there was no suspicion. It was definitely a smirk. “Every flight in the country. Grounded all of them.”

Mike didn’t have a chance to admit that yes, he might have his head up his ass, because the man had already walked away. It didn’t bother Mike, however. He was preoccupied with the weirdness of the terminal. He hadn’t been traveling back in 2001, the last time flights were grounded, but he bet it had been like this. On 9/11, people would have been crowded around airport televisions watching the endless loop of the towers coming down. Now, Mike wasn’t exactly sure what they were looking at; the screens were captioned with
Delhi, India
, and what he saw didn’t make a ton of sense. And yet it did. The families and business travelers stranded in the Minneapolis airport might not understand what was happening, what to make of the brief snippet from India, but it took only a few seconds from Mike’s hearing that flights were grounded to his putting the dots together. Spiders. It had to be. Nothing else really made any sense. Not that spiders made sense. But with what had happened to Henderson, with his trip to DC, meeting the president, that’s what it had to be. And that meant that the president, the good-looking scientist, the people who got paid to tell agents like him what to do, were freaking out. Grounding the entire country? That was some serious shit.