Мэтт Рихтел - Dead on Arrival

“Well now, there’s a sane thought,” Jerry muttered. “Except that you’ve made us all turn off our phones.”

With about as much sense of cohesion as the United States Congress, they drove to a nearby café and Eleanor asked a man if she might borrow his phone because she’d lost hers and needed to call a friend. No biggie, the guy said. She looked at the number on the receipt for the Days Inn.

She asked for Jackie Badger’s room.

“Connecting you now to 106,” the woman said.

Eleanor hung up.

Jackie’s phone rang. She looked down and recognized the number.

“Ms. Badger?”

“This is she.”

“Hi, it’s Becky from the Days Inn.”

“Hi, Becky.”

“You asked me to call you if anyone called to ask for you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Someone called just a few minutes ago.”

“Asking for me.”

“Right. I told them what you said to.”

“Becky, well done. Was it a man or a woman?”

“Woman’s voice.”

Jackie winced and her eye twitched. “Thank you, Becky,” she managed.

“You’re welcome. Thank you for the new iPad and a new iPhone. I don’t know what to say. I’ve never gotten anything like this before in my life.”

“My pleasure. I take care of the people who take care of me.”

“Is there anything else you need, Ms. Badger?”

“No, Becky. I’m good. Just keep me posted.”

“Yes, ma’am. And, um, ma’am—”

“Jackie is fine.”

“Yes, Jackie. You want me to do the other thing, too?”

“Yep, just like we talked about. Thank you, Becky.” She hung up. She sighed. It had been a long time without sleep, and hard work. She’d moved her operation downstairs into one of the exam rooms they had used for study subjects. It had entailed moving a computer and two monitors. The gadgets sat on a table, Jackie in the swivel desk chair, and Alex lying on her side, dumb smile on her face. Jackie liked the idea of having her there, a mascot. Down here, at least on the scientists’ side of the room, it was protected from the electromagnetic field. Not so much on the other side, where the study subjects used to sit. An empty chair was there and, as Jackie looked at it, she sure hoped she’d eventually have Lyle on her side and that she wouldn’t have to put him in that chair.

She turned back to her screen. On the window, a news website showed streaming video of protesters beginning to gather for the next day’s public display of citizen gun power. Mostly white men, wearing camouflage or green, milling the National Mall, looking at the National Guardsmen, stoically standing with automatic rifles strapped against their chests. The guardsmen peered back. They scanned the crowd for weapons. A policeman with a megaphone repeated that “citizens who open-carry weapons without a permit will be subject to arrest.” Salivating journalists dotted the mall, setting the stage for tomorrow’s possible conflagration. “Twelve hours and counting,” a sideline reporter said, trying to sound concerned about this prospect: Would a protester open fire? A cop?; Would you be arrested if you had an open-carry permit from your home state?; Would it become a firefight? The reporter said: “It’s a tinderbox.”

“Get a load of this, Alex,” Jackie said to her comatose coworker. “We could look like heroes. Shutting it all down, hitting pause, right before all hell breaks loose.”

She looked at Alex and then back at the screen.

She clicked into a box reading China Telecom.

13:45:18

13:45:17

The drive took place largely in silence, aside from the slipstream of wind seeping into the car. The Miata was not built for road trips. It was loud and cramped. And goose chase didn’t begin to capture the quixotic basis for the trip. Each, though, had motivations. Jerry, who fashioned himself as a man of action, wasn’t about to sit around and let this infuriating moment pass without doing something. Plus, this Lyle guy irked the shit out of him, the more so because Jerry saw some connection between Lyle and Eleanor. I’ve got your back, he thought to himself as he watched Eleanor, and you’ll be grateful for it when the time comes .

Eleanor had made a simple calculation that it made more sense to go than not. But it wasn’t satisfying in the least because the margin of her decision was razor thin, like 51 percent to 49 percent. Or maybe her decision was more of a plurality: 50 percent go on a goose chase; 49 percent don’t go; 1 percent have no freaking clue, or what’s the alternative?

Two things pushed her over the top. One was that someone had died on her airplane, an old man, and she knew—absolutely knew—that she’d done nothing wrong to cause that. The second thing was that, on some basic level, she trusted this Dr. Martin. Such an odd combination of guileless and cunning. Not evil cunning, or wily, but brilliant cunning. She’d looked him up on the Internet before their first meeting. She knew what he’d been once. She was left to wonder what had caused him to come undone. It bore watching. She sat in silence in the passenger seat, trying to take in as much information as she might, watching the side of the increasingly dark road disappear in the rearview mirror.

For his part, Lyle had moved beyond thinking and into instinct. The frontal lobe of his brain, the part involved in decision making and higher-level analysis, would be surprisingly free of activity at times like these. What prevailed was free association, the appearance in his mind’s eye of ideas that might be loosely described as taking the shape of puzzle pieces. He tried to link them and, sometimes, frustrated, he would emit a sound of disgust. In a couple of these moments, Eleanor would glance at Jerry, which would send her first officer into a pleasure spiral because the two of them were seeing eye-to-eye. Jerry felt the shape of his gun in his back holster and he smiled.

They pulled off at an exit just before nine o’clock looking for gas and food.

At the Chevron, Jerry fueled up and they all stared at the video monitor located on the pump. It was a split screen, one side featuring an ad with an adorable-looking cartoon car smiling because it was being filled up with Chevron gas; the other side showed marchers descending on the Washington Mall. One held a placard with an automatic weapon drawn on it. He was being confronted by a young person poking a finger in his chest.

Jerry looked at Lyle.

“What is it with you and this woman?” Jerry asked.

“I don’t know. Other than…” Lyle’s back ached from the small backseat confines. “How much do you guys know about the immune system?”

“Fights disease,” Jerry said.

“Exactly. The way it does so is kind of incredible. First, it has to recognize a threat. There are trillions of possible alien threats and some of them can look a lot like normal cells. So that’s no small feat. Then it has to—”

“Please tell me he’s going somewhere with this,” Jerry whined condescendingly to Eleanor.

“I think so.”

Jerry pulled out of the gas station and into the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger and took a spot while Lyle explained how the immune system has to look for subtle signs of a dangerous, often deadly, invader, then look for ways to attach to those cells and figure out how to produce proteins capable of attacking the offender. It is an extremely delicate task, arguably the most sophisticated cat-and-mouse game in the world.

“I think she wants to see if I can discover her and then…” He paused. “She’s putting out these clues. She’s trying to get seen, or discovered.”

“Pretty damn narcissistic if you ask me,” Jerry added.