Cold Silence (10 page)

She had guts, I had to say that much. I thought about the fright on her face just before she got the news about me and Eddie. For an instant she'd looked like she cared about us. But I wasn't going to be fooled twice. She'd been concerned for herself, probably, since she was going to fly with us.

I don't give people two chances.

Then, while we flew, the news got worse.

—

As the jet crossed Tennessee, we learned—CDC confirmed—that the blood samples Eddie and I had taken from Somalia matched the organism out West. As we reached the Mississippi River, I was sleeping, exhausted after being awake for more than thirty hours. Eddie woke me to take a last blood sample. I gazed out as the hypo pricked me. After hunting diseases for years, I'd come to regard the atmosphere as filled with invisible pathways for contagion,
plane routes
, that
instantly link places that centuries ago required months to reach. Now an outbreak in Guinea can reach Kansas in a day.

Below, the gritty urban centers of the East had dropped away, fields replaced streets, mountains replaced fields, and forests rose up and fell and finally the jet was landing in a Nevada valley. I saw dun-colored landscape. Sheer escarpments in the distance. I saw a two-lane highway devoid of traffic except for a military convoy converging on the base. Creech was a sprawling boxcar shape, inside of which the lone runway and its taxi lanes formed a gigantic cross from the air. I looked down on living quarters, administrative building, and hangars. Indian Springs—nearest big town—lay twenty miles off. Galilee was a mere dot a few miles from the base, and the town had a circle of vehicles surrounding it. Those would be quarantine troops.

As we got lower, I was surprised to spot a small crowd outside the gate, and dozens of cars and campers parked off the road in no particular configuration, and lower still, I saw the hand-painted protest signs, some so large they required two people to hold them up. Words flashed past as we landed.

DRONES KILL INNOCENT WOMEN AND CHILDREN
.

DRONES MAKE ENEMIES
.

GROUND THE DRONES OR REAP THE WHIRLWIND
.

“You're allowing civilian protestors to stay this close?” I asked, shocked.

Chris looked unhappy. “Moving them would have required a court order, explanations, and it would have replaced them with state police to block the road. Either way, civilians there. So we let it lie. They think the troops surrounding the base are on a drill,” she said.

Eddie asked, “Do prevailing winds move from inside the base toward the protestors?”

“Based on what you told us from Somalia, there was no spread due to wind.”

“Do the protestors know about the Galilee quarantine?”

“If they do,” said Chris. “They think it's part of the drill, but sooner or later we'll see YouTube videos.”

She sat two rows back, alone, wearing a Moldex HEPA surgical mask over her nose and mouth, just in case. But based on timelines, we were clean.

“None of the soldiers I see are in biosuits,” I said.

Her eyes scrunched into an expression that made her look fourteen, and worried. “Suits on the way. Personnel in the hospital and around Galilee have them. But we need more.”

Eddie said, “I have a feeling we'll need a lot more than just suits. This whole thing is about to blow.”

—

In the United States, the Posse Comitatus Act forbids domestic counterterrorism operations by the U.S. military. Accordingly, we were met by two FBI agents from the Vegas Anti-Terror Rapid Deployment Team in a black Chevy. Dome light pulsing, we turned off the run-up area, and passed a lone parked drone baking in the sun, looking like a spindly, miniature 747. Domed cockpit shape. V-shaped fins in back, and propellers. No windows. It seemed small, toy-like, harmless. Then again, a microbe is small, too.

The base seemed deserted, but I knew it was filled with personnel locked in barracks, who'd watched us come in.

I felt Chris's thigh against mine in the back of the vehicle. She pulled it away.

Special Agent Manny Vargas drove, and Special Agent Carrie LeHavre did the talking. She'd been ordered to hold nothing back. Both agents wore matching field clothes, neat T-shirts with the FBI logo in gold, khaki trousers, and surgical masks. Vargas was dark, short, moved crisply, and wore wire glasses. His fingernails on the wheel were slightly bitten. LeHarve was slim and shag blond and
wore small pink pearl earrings and matching gloss. She handed me a zip-up folio, which, I saw, contained two dozen photos.

“Officers usually fly the drones in two-man teams. The top photo there, sir, those two men fell ill first; then a tech sergeant. Then people in town.”

In the shot, the officers wore olive drab zip-up flight suits and sat in adjoining, comfortable-looking brown leather high-backed chairs, flight displays before them, video screen above, whitish control board at knee level, toggle sticks for steering drones in between.

“Do the officers know the victims in town?”

“Captain Reyes's girlfriend is sick. So yes.”

“Have the officers visited Galilee recently, or have townspeople been on the base?”

A sigh. “There's a bar in Galilee where a lot of personnel hang out, especially on Friday nights. Flip side, five residents of Galilee work on base. Two carpenters. An electrician. And a couple of computer techs.”

“Great.” Eddie moaned. “That's about a thousand possible routes of infection.”

So we start eliminating possibilities.
I asked, starting a written checklist on my lap, “Anyone check the ventilation systems on base for microbes?”

I was thinking about Legionnaires' disease, a fatal pneumonia that can break out at hotels, and spread inside old air circulation systems or even hot tub steam.

“Air systems clean,” Vargas replied.

“Any military activity inside Galilee? Maybe a drone went down, got recovered in town or nearby.”

“Nothing.”

“Do all the victims know each other?”

“Some do. Some don't.”

Eddie asked, “Did some special event occur recently where townies and base personnel mixed?”

“I told you, the bar. Look, can I ask you a question? If they're not coughing, how is it passing from person to person?”

“Don't assume it's contagious yet,” I said.

Chris Vekey stared at me.

“You
still
don't think it's contagious?”

“I'm just not assuming it's passing from person to person yet. Could be point source. Water. Food. A building. Tell me about Galilee,” I asked LeHarve. “The town.”

“Anything specific you want to know?”

“Whatever comes to mind.”

LeHarve glanced at Vargas, then shrugged.

“Nothing special, Colonel. Boring old mining town. Its heyday was in the 1950s. Uranium mines nearby. They closed over a quarter century ago. They're boarded up.”

Eddie's breath caught. “Uranium?”

The agent's eyes in the rearview mirror flicked to me. Vargas drove evenly and LeHarve's voice was low and accented, her “a” an “ahhh,” as in Boston. Three white biohazard suits, folded and wrapped in plastic, lay in the trunk for us. The AC was on in the car, temp control at seventy.

I asked, “Has anyone visited the mines recently? Kids? Researchers? Any chance that water there mixes with the drinking supply for Galilee or the base? Do the town and base share a water source?”

The agents looked at each other. “I don't know.”

“Well, someone needs to check.”

“I'll do that,” Chris said.

I continued thoughtfully, “Nobody said anything before about uranium mines. About how radiation can change cell DNA.”

Eddie agreed, agitated over the lapse. “Nobody in D.C. saw a connection between a possible mutant organism and
uranium mines
? Hell, didn't anyone think of the new bacteria coming out of Chernobyl? That fucking black fungus there? And how about old nuclear
test sites
here
? The 1950s. Nevada. Anyone check if this location was downwind of those old tests? If this place got a dose?”

Chris said, “I'll check that, too. But if this microbe originated in Africa, why are you asking about sources here?”

“Because maybe someone here
went
to Africa. Contracted it here and carried it there. Like the Spanish flu in 1918. Soldiers got it at Fort Riley, Kansas, and brought it to Europe. Agent Vargas, is there any possibility that someone from Creech or Galilee went to Somalia recently? Or Kenya? Missionary work? Scientist? Soldier? Hell, a tourist even?”

It turned out that the agents had not been told that anyone was sick in Somalia so they had not asked—
goddamn need to know
. Now that they knew, “We'll check that, too.”

Eddie had had it with the lack of information, with
goddamn
need to know
. He snapped out, “Well, what the hell
have
you been checking if not water, mines, or travel?”

“So far, sir, possible connections between anyone in Galilee or the protesters and extremist groups. We've been checking hard drives, phone records, background, even of locals.”

“Find any? Connections?”

“A couple of those wackos at the gate have visited some pretty dicey websites. We're also tracking license plates. There's a woman from Tulsa who is a second cousin of the Oklahoma City bomber, McVeigh. So! Website links to African and Mideast Islamic groups, and links to right-wingers.”

I turned to Chris. “We need a list of victims in Somalia. Background. Family. Travel. Check backward from Somalia, see if there are connections here.”

Chris looked unhappy. “We're on that. State had a list of everyone in that research camp. SUNY had to submit applications. So far, nothing.”

The problem is that we're in a race. A minute-by-minute race.
Because this thing may be spreading. Leapfrogging. Like a forest fire that suddenly breaks out miles from the source, just touches down, and starts up in a new place.

Chris said, more softly, “Colonel, in the hospital, you take the lead. That's why I brought you.”

Was that a peace offering? If so, it did little good. I thought,
No, I'm here because you fired my boss and threatened me with military prison. Fuck you and fuck Burke, both of you.

Then I pushed away the hurt pride. I owed it to Lionel Nash and the other victims, and the sick people here. As we reached the base hospital, I saw two ambulances pull up to the emergency entrance. Medical personnel in protective gear moved to open the back doors.

Chris said morosely, “If this is spreading naturally, my God, at this speed, we better clamp down pretty damn fast. If it's
seeding
, we may be up against the biggest mass murderer in history. I don't know which is worse.”

Dr. Inoma Okoye, who met us outside at the hospital, was fiftiesh, brisk but personable, a pear-shaped smoker of pipes who smelled of Borkum Riff and Old Spice aftershave. He'd been flown in from Montana to manage the situation. I was glad to see him. In the small world of biowarfare prep, he was a standout. I'd met him at Harvard. I'd also read several of his articles on quarantine procedures in third world countries in
Prevention Monthly
. He was the kind of person you wanted in charge when improvisation was called for. He had no ego involved. Just smarts.

“Ah, Joe and Eddie! It is good that you came. Too often the decision makers hang back in the capital, and that's how you make mistakes. And you were in Somalia? Yes?”

“Close as it gets,” Eddie said.

“Maybe you will spot something we missed. We are getting a whole new round of sick. Come.”

Okoye had been born in London to Nigerian diplomat parents. He'd gotten his med degree in Chicago, married here, and stayed. He'd
worked in West Africa with Doctors Without Borders, in an Ebola outbreak. He was calm and unflappable, qualities I associated with top emergency doctors. There was no mistaking the quiet alarm in his eyes.

“We face something totally new. I have not seen anything like this, even in Africa. First we had the initial group. Now we are up to twenty-two, with more coming in hourly.”

To accommodate new arrivals, he'd directed modifications in the hospital, normally a fifty-bed facility that could handle emergencies, but not more complex cases.

“Joe, we brought in state-of-the-art portable patient isolator units, the British ones. Blocked off two floors, used air blowers and plastic sheeting to create makeshift air locks elsewhere; chemical showers for doctors; collection tanks for runoff; separate disposal units for biohazardous material.

“We sealed off air vents on other floors, replaced nurses with trained staff from Montana, and upgraded the lab in the basement. Now we can analyze samples here, even as duplicate versions are flown to Atlanta.”

“At least there's air-conditioning here,” Eddie said.

I told Okoye, after we suited up, and as we headed upstairs, “In Somalia, everyone got sick at the same time. But not here, you said?”

“No. There was a gap. A first group as a mass. Then a one-by-one increase.”

“Uno,” Eddie asked, “you thinking what I am?”

“Yeah. In Somalia, since everyone got symptomatic at the same time, they were all
infected
at the same time. That suggests point source. Food. Water. Something common. But
here,
you have an initial infection, then it starts to spread to a different group.”

Okoye finished my thinking. “Meaning, if you are right, both initial groups were infected intentionally, and in Nevada the pathogen began to move outward. Contagious.”

“It must be. I'd been hoping it wasn't.”

Okoye nodded unhappily. We were in the elevator. “We always knew it was just a matter of time, that small changes in the DNA of even benign bacteria could amplify toxicity. Ramshaw and Jackson and their virulent mousepox. They created it in a lab and promptly destroyed it.”

“Or Furst,” said Eddie morosely, referring to the researcher at Totalgen, Inc. in Wisconsin who designed an E. coli strain—one of the most common bacteria—to be thirty thousand times more resistant to antibiotics. Furst also destroyed his creation, after an outcry by other professionals. His work proved that small changes could turn common bacteria into super killers.

Okoye sighed. “I've started half of our cases on a normal anti-leprosy regimen: rifampin, clofazimine, and dapsone. Too soon to see if it works. On others I'm trying different strategy, broad spectrum combo: penicillin, aminoglycoside, metronidazole.”

I recognized these drugs. “You think it's related to necrotizing fasciitis? To flesh-eating bacteria?”

Okoye shrugged. “No response there either, Joe.”

—

Air Force Captain Joaquin Reyes, first official victim at Creech, lay like a space traveler inside a cylindrical patient isolator unit, a high-tech tent of reinforced plastic that looked like a gigantic roll of cellophane and came with built-in hoods, sleeves, and gloves to allow medical staff protection while they worked on a patient.

Bolted to the cylinder was a smaller, squarish airlock through which nurses could pass food and drink to Reyes, and remove body waste.

“The waste is heat sealed and removed for disposal in an autoclave,” Dr. Okoye said.

Air inside the cylinder was kept at negative pressure by pumps, to lower any chance of aerosolization of bacteria if Reyes started coughing.

Between the air pumps and plastic screens, Reyes and I would
communicate through three layers of protection. The face looking out, distorted by plastic sheeting, was monstrous, mottled by growths, right eyelid drooping almost shut. The irises were inflamed, red, veined, and watery. Earbuds piped music or TV into him. He balanced a screen-tablet TV on knees poking out from beneath his hospital gown, the skin rife with more sores. The gray hospital socks bulged outward, as if the feet were bandaged. The hands balancing the tablet looked like bandaged paws. Half of his condition seemed to consist of flesh growing, half of it being eaten away.

Before I could speak, Eddie nudged me. Following his gaze, I looked up at the corner TV. CNN was on, and a banner running across the screen read, U.S. DRONES HIT SOMALI TERRORISTS
.
I saw a global hawk reconnaissance shot of a Somali town, houses wrecked, Technicals burning, bodies sprawled on a street.

U.S. RETALIATES FOR MURDERED SCIENTISTS
.
DEAD INCLUDE WOMEN AND CHILDREN. OUTRAGE SPREADS ACROSS ISLAMIC WORLD
.

As the scene changed to a mob outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, I had a sense of the contagion spreading in a different way. There came an overpowering sense of malignant forces converging.

I glanced sharply at Chris. I figured that she'd known the attack was scheduled, and hidden this from us.

But she looked shocked beneath her plastic visor. “I knew they were thinking about it.”

“But why?” I said, aware that Reyes had looked up. The swollen face stared out at me, left eye bulging, like a fish in an aquarium.

Chris said, “Why? They
killed Americans.
You witnessed it, Joe. How can you even ask why?”

“Because what I saw in Somalia were people trying to protect themselves from infection, same as protocol 80 here, a recently revamped worst-case strategy, buried in a Pentagon drawer.”

“You're defending them?”

“No, but now we can't talk to them, can't learn anything else from them. There's no proof that they're even responsible for the infection in the first place.”

“They burned thirty people to death, including healthy ones,” she snapped. “I would think that
you of
all
people
would regard retaliation as—”

She stopped abruptly. She turned bright red. At that moment of face-reading honesty, I knew that she'd seen my file. Burke must have shared it.
She knew the truth about me.

And then the patient cleared his throat and I concentrated on the wrecked face, and wiped away personal concerns to give full attention to the man lying below.

Even in this first second, if we hadn't had lab verification, it was obvious,
It's the same thing. He's not the first patient. He's fortieth in a growing line.

The nose was eaten away. The nostrils—what was left—seemed raised up. The eyebrows were gone, the neck and wrists a mass of bumps, so joined together in places that they formed the entire surface of his skin.

“Captain Reyes? I'm Colonel Joe Rush, a former U.S. Marine. I'm also a doctor. I'm here to help. I'd be grateful if we talked, if you don't mind.”

On the wall, someone had hung glassed-in Matisse posters. Jazz instruments, cut-outs. They didn't lighten the mood. Their cheeriness accentuated the grotesque.

“Marines?” said Reyes in the same ravaged whisper that I'd heard overseas.
The same fucking thing.

“Yes, Captain.”

His face showed no emotion. It couldn't. The muscles had no mobility. But the anger was raw and that was welcome. I'll take rage in a patient over resignation any day of the week.

“Actually, sir, I mind plenty. No one answers
our
questions. All we do is answer yours.”

“Ask whatever you want.”

Chris cleared her throat warningly and Okoye looked stern. I knew the drill.
Until we know that base personnel weren't involved in this, we do not share what we know.

Reyes tried to lay the newspaper on his chest but his hands did not function. One section slipped out, drifted to the floor, by the urine container. “
What
I want?
What the hell is happening to us, sir? Me, and my girlfriend. Jana.”

“We don't know yet.” My eyes flicked to the TV overhead, where CNN was showing the Africa shots again, over and over. Repetition substituting for depth. “But it may have started in Somalia.” Chris's fingers tightened on my arm. She seemed about to say something, but I rode over any protest. “I've just come from there. What you have broke out there first. And a South Carolina couple came down with it, too, after being here recently.”

“Somalia? But that's where we fly drones!”

I removed Chris's hand from my suited-over forearm. Her gloves and mine touched. I felt coolness beneath latex. But she wasn't ordering me to stop, interesting, because shutting me up here was her job.

Reyes struggled to rise inside his cylinder, and succeeded only in raising himself a few inches. “You're saying this is an attack? Because of our drones?”

I got down on my knees, to be at his eye level. Eddie and I were stationed in Alaska last year, and something that my Iñupiat friends taught me there stuck with me now. In Eskimo culture, you never talk down to a child, or an old person. It accentuates a helpless feeling. I didn't know whether the same custom applied to dealing with the sick in Barrow, but it seemed a good idea here. I looked into Reyes's eyes levelly, from a few protected inches away.

“It's possible. I need your help to try to figure this out. I'll probably ask a lot of the same questions you've answered already, but I may ask new ones, or have a different take on the old answers. Time is crucial.”

“I want to talk to my girlfriend, sir. Jana's here, too. But the docs say if we talk, we'll compare stories. Like we can't think for ourselves. Like, if she says something, I'll just agree. But there's nothing wrong with my brain.”

Okoye was nodding, arms folded. The principle was the same one police used when separating witnesses to a crime, or co-conspirators. For the first few hours, you needed fresh perspectives. So you interviewed people separately. But my witnesses were sick, not criminals. After a while they wouldn't need to stay apart. I explained this to Reyes. He could talk to Jana soon. He did not like it. But he said, “No one explained it before like that.”

Twenty minutes later I'd learned nothing new about symptoms, but I knew,
He goes to the bar in Galilee regularly, and he was last there nine days ago.

I asked, “Anything happen there that night? Out of the ordinary? A person? A taste? Argument?”

“It was Tech Sergeant Mack's birthday. We celebrated.”

“Is Sergeant Mack sick, too?”

“He died, I heard.”

Reyes's girlfriend, Jana, was in the snapshot on his night table. A smiling Reyes—handsome man—had his arm around a happy, slim, plain-faced woman in tight jeans, a checkered shirt, and a felt cowboy hat with the brim turned down to highlight blue eyes. They were on a boardwalk. It looked like the Santa Monica Pier. I saw lots of bare skin in it, and all the skin looked fine.

“Pretty girl,” I said.

“Colonel Rush, one more thing. Dumb little thing, but it will mean a lot to her. She's terrified.”

“Tell me.”

“If I can't talk to her, I want to do something for her. To make her feel better. There's this restaurant in Vegas, sir. Jana can't get enough of the Napoli Volcano Special,” said the wrecked mouth. “I
asked the other doctor, can you get her one? Comfort food? Three cheeses? Special sauce? I'll pay. He said no. She's scared, sir. Please. She's like an addict for that sandwich.”

“Dr. Okoye,” I asked, “why can't she have the food?”

“Dr. Markowitz advised against this.”

“Who is Dr. Markowitz?”

“He's our gastroenterologist. He's trying to eliminate milk products as the cause of—”

“Milk products? For Christ's sake,” I snapped. “Captain Reyes, what's the sandwich she likes?”

“The Napoli Volcano Special.”

Half the patients here might be dead in twenty-four hours, and some asshole was denying someone a sandwich?