He reminds Michael of Shelby.
“You’re younger than I thought,” John says.
By one calculation, Michael is forty-four, but in another sense, he is only four days old. To the boy, he says, “And I suspect you’re older than your years.”
Nina confirms, “He’s that, all right,” and the boy ducks his head, shying away from the praise.
“It won’t be easy leaving your friends.”
“What friends?” the boy asks.
“I know you have them.”
“You mean school friends.”
“A hard thing for most kids.”
“School friends aren’t forever. Everyone grows up and moves on. That’s how it is.”
Impressed, Michael says, “I know you’ll help your mother through this.”
If John is ever capable of looking at his mother without his intense love being apparent, this is not one of those moments. He clearly adores her. “We’re always all right.”
“Always,” she says.
“Stay home from school,” Michael advises.
“I’m not afraid,” the boy says.
“It’s not about being afraid. It’s about being smart.”
His mother says, “You can help me pack, sweetheart.”
“So we’re going.”
“If we really hustle,” she says, “we can be out of here tomorrow afternoon.”
“To where?”
“Wherever we want. We have resources.”
“The sooner the better,” Michael reminds her.
He smiles at John, and the boy responds to the smile with a sober expression that says he has been aware of the stakes for most of his life.
THE ARM OF THE STATE
The declared purpose of the sprawling Internal Security Agency is to seek, discover, monitor, and eliminate every threat to the nation that might arise within its borders, and the ISA actually does some of that. As the agency has evolved, however, its primary purposes are to guarantee the perpetuation of the labyrinthine and unelected bureaucracy that in truth runs the country, ensure the prerogatives of the ruling class, and to monitor that only the right kind of people are gorging themselves at the public trough. With the tens of billions of dollars in its annual budget, the ISA is a vast wasp’s nest that can dispatch swarms of agents to every real, fabricated, and imagined crisis.
Among those busy hornets of the law, Durand Calaphas is unique. While some other agents might be dedicated to the job, Calaphas is obsessed with it. He has no wife, no children, no significant other. His mother and father are living, but he finds them too tedious to be worth his attention. His IQ is 178, well above the number that would qualify him as a genius. James Bond is licensed to kill, but considering the importance of the cases assigned to Calaphas, he is not merely licensed but pretty much required to kill on a frequent basis. He has no compunctions about killing, whether it is justified or not. The ease with which he commits lethal violence has given him the highest case-closure record in the organization. Consequently, while other operatives work in pairs and larger units, Calaphas’s desire to work alone is honored, much to the relief of the numerous other agents who would be afraid to partner with him.
Six days after the catastrophe north of the city, Calaphas is camped in the office of the late Simon Bistoury, co-director of a facility where fifty-four perished and one has gone missing. He has spent the past six hours drinking bottles of green tea sweetened with honey while reviewing high-definition security video on a fifty-five-inch LED screen. He has become fixated on forty-six seconds of video captured by cameras in the makeshift morgue that was established in this building in the wake of the disaster.
Ostensibly, this facility was a private enterprise, the research division of a beauty-products company tasked with developing formulas for moisturizing creams, wrinkle eliminators, exfoliants, makeup, lipstick, and other products. In fact, it was a top-secret project co-financed by the federal government and two high-tech firms whose names are more familiar to Americans than are the names of their senators.
The microorganisms being developed here were neither viruses nor bacteria, but a hybrid of nanomachines and archaea—the former made by human scientists, the latter by Nature. Until 1978, archaea were thought to be bacteria, but they are quite different; bacteria are ester-based organisms, while archaea are ether based and the more stable of the two. Because neither nanomachines nor archaea can cause infections, no one foresaw a need to conduct this research in a level-four isolation lab under the strictest of protocols, but at least the building was constructed to maintain a hermetical seal that is 99.65 percent effective. When the lungs and then the bloodstreams of the staff were invaded by the latest version of the hybrid microbe, these men and women weren’t infected in the classic sense of the word, but they perished in minutes.
One of the dead—no one yet knows who—proved sufficiently courageous and perspicacious to trigger a lockdown before anyone could flee and bring this mysterious contagion to the outside world. Every possible exit is covered with multiple cameras, none of which recorded the departure of an escapee.
Nevertheless, of the fifty-five who were on duty, one man is missing, as if he turned to mist. All evidence suggests that he perished with everyone else. Yet his corpse is not among the dead.
Three hours after the event, when a remote inspection of the premises through its security cameras showed no living survivors, ISA specialists had taken advantage of the facility’s hermetical seal, pumping the building full of a series of gases that destroyed all microorganisms and corroded all man-made nanoparticles. The sterilization and phagocytic cleansing were deemed complete after six hours, whereupon agents entered the building wearing inflatable-plastic suits and airtight helmets, breathing oxygen from bottles strapped to their backs. For six hours, they tested surfaces in all labs and other rooms for evidence that lethal organisms had survived the purging gases. Then, sixteen hours after the initial alarm, the building was flooded with purified air and aggressively vented to be sure that no pockets of gas remained in the structure; this required two hours. No longer specially suited up, agents spent the next eight hours exhaustively photographing all the dead in situ and moving the bodies into a large chamber that had been the cafeteria but that had been converted into a temporary morgue where rows of folding tables served as catafalques. Portable chillers kept the temperature between thirty-four and thirty-six degrees. End day one.
By the late afternoon of day two, the ISA had identified four military coroners who qualified for security clearances regarding the most sensitive matters, and who also had no reservations about signing nondisclosure agreements so stringent that they would be financially ruined and imprisoned for violating them. Those four were brought to the site, where the largest laboratory had been converted into four fully equipped autopsy stations. For four days, these highly experienced forensic pathologists have been bringing their skills to bear on the fifty-four corpses chilling in the former cafeteria.
Now, in the project-director’s suite, Durand Calaphas sits in a comfortable Herman Miller office chair that he has rolled to within three feet of the enormous wall-mounted screen. He uses the Crestron control to study those forty-six seconds of enigmatic video over and over again, sometimes selecting quadrants of the image to enlarge to full screen, sometimes watching the sequence in the format in which it was filmed.