“Is there any food on board?” I asked, feeling particularly contrary.
“None,” Breaker said. “There’s hot coffee. Very hot.”
This army, I saw, would not be running on its stomach. The stomach and everything south could no longer be trusted.
34
8:00 p.m., AUGUST 14 • MANHATTAN
THE JENNER BUILDING, “ANTHRAX CENTRAL”
We drove down the wide alley behind the gray cube. I saw the steel door Ben had described, covered with acid swaths of graffiti. At a honk, the door was pushed open from the inside. Breaker and two other agents got out of our cars and conferred with figures from inside the building, wearing white decontamination suits. They gestured and talked for some time.
I looked through the window at the blank expanse of stone and concrete rising to a sunny morning sky. New York was putting on its best face. It was going to be a beautiful day.
My entire self had shrunk to a little point. Exhausted, wrung out, the point was vaguely aware of the past, intensely connected with the present, unwilling to consider the future. It was only loosely related to the former Prince Hal and all his desires.
I was an animal, a cat, a bear, a rabbit. I did not want to be human.
Breaker returned to the car and tapped the glass. The driver rolled my window down, and Breaker leaned over. “We’re clear, but our opposition within the Agency and the rest of the government could join the party at any minute, so we have to move fast. Offense has finished, security is in, and a technical team will be here soon to back you up. Ready?”
I nodded, lying.
Breaker opened the door. Ben got out on the other side and puffed his cheeks, sucking in some courage from the air. “I do not want to go back in there,” he said. “That means I have to.”
“Right,” Breaker said. Not a smile between them. A rigor and honor thing I certainly did not feel.
I was terrified, but I would do it for Rob.
We walked through the steel door. Immediately inside, four men in white-plastic suits with clear flexible helmets helped us put on similar outfits and attached our tanks. We had three hours of air, assuming moderate exertion.
I looked around the loading dock as the men adjusted my straps. Directly ahead, the big aquariums Ben had described had been shot up and drained, leaving the dock floor wet and smelling of saltwater. To the right, I counted twenty bodies arranged in rows under white sheets. A man in a transparent plastic outfit was dousing them with antiseptic from a pump cylinder, like a gardener spraying lilies.
I was ready. One of the white-plastic suits gave me a gloved thumbs-up.
“Can you hear me?” Ben asked. His voice was a little muffled, but carried clearly enough.
Everyone I saw looked pasty and unhappy, and no wonder. We rely on our little bacterial allies. They do a lot of work for us. They are vigilant defenders as well as, at times, harsh judges. Now we were trying to get along without these support systems. We had turned our guts into war zones.
Breaker took us up the steel steps to the platform. I looked through the shattered glass of the nearest aquarium. Slime and big black lumps rose from a thin slick of water.
“What was this?” Breaker asked, too loud, like someone speaking while wearing headphones. He pointed at the slime.
“Little Mothers of the World?” I guessed, and shrugged my shoulders.
“I still don’t get the crap about ‘Little Mothers,’ “ Ben said.
“Bacterial colonies from the sea—those black lumps could be stromatolites. Golokhov wanted to study how bacteria form communities. Maybe it was mystical, like keeping the bones of a saint. Maybe he thought we’re all just evolved super-colonies of bacteria, spaceships for bacteria, with no will of our own. That sort of crap.”
A formal young woman with an experienced no-nonsense face and buzz-trimmed inch-long hair met with our group. She carried an assault rifle with a prominent clip. “Secret Service, Nancy Delbarco,” she said through her plastic hood. “Follow me.” Her eyes were focused and unemotional, but her lips, tight and grim, betrayed her. She was scared, too.
“We’ve restored some power,” she told us, as we marched behind the shattered aquariums. “The elevators are still out. Each floor has its own power supply, but some cables were cut and generators sabotaged. Right here”—she pointed at the concrete floor—“we’re above three levels of basement, going down about fifty feet. We haven’t explored the lowest level, but it seems to be mostly storage and infrastructure—air-conditioning, steam plant, water, the pumps that maintained the aquariums. There are subway tunnels below that, so we’ve had trains halted until we certify the building is not rigged to blow.”
“How many died?” I asked.
“Enough,” Delbarco said in a tone that implied it was a rude question. “I don’t know how long we can stay. There could be an opposition team arriving any minute, and we certainly don’t want to get involved in another firefight.”
“We’re still not in complete control either at the top or locally,” Breaker said.
“Garvey?” Ben asked.
“His bosses have influence,” Breaker conceded.
Delbarco led us up a long flight of stairs. The lighting was dismal. The painted steel stair treads showed shiny wear patterns. Peering up past the center railing, I could see all the way to the top of the building—sixteen stories.
“The first four floors are vats and steel culture tanks, like a brewery,” Delbarco said. “Most haven’t been used for a long time. It’s difficult to conceive why they would need so much tagging material, but we could be making a bad guess. The techs will get samples when they arrive.”
“That was what my brother wanted,” I said absently.
Three floors. It was tough getting enough air in the hood, but I was doing okay. Ben was working to conceal his condition, or lack of it.
Delbarco pushed open the door on the fourth floor. We walked over a shiny, vitreous blue-gray floor between shadowed rows of steel vats, the largest twenty feet high and ten feet wide, surrounded by cooling coils and forests and arches of color-coded piping. At the opposite end, a glass-walled laboratory stood empty, its benches sparkling clean and cabinets bare. Two of the wide panes of glass had been shot out and lay in jagged shards all over the floor.
A body lay slumped against the only intact pane: a slender young woman in her late teens, a small hole dimpling her forehead and a puddle of blood under her thighs. She had once had the intense, lean beauty of an Eastern Bloc gymnast. She wore denim overalls and a red T-shirt.
Delbarco walked past the corpse. “We’ve got some children, live children, quite a few of them, on the eighth floor,” she said. “They don’t have weapons, none we can see at any rate, so we’re just . . . working around them for the moment.”
I thought of Nicolae Ceausescu, former dictator of Romania, recruiting his core bodyguards from orphanages, raising kids from childhood to serve in a kind of Praetorian Guard. He had been deposed and executed in 1989. His kids had supported him fanatically to the very end. They had had to be put down like rabid dogs.
