John Barnes - Directive 51

While she was scrubbing, the phone rang; she heard him talking for a minute before he wheeled into the bathroom. “Cameron Nguyen-Peters wants us to attend a meeting of DRET at DHS.”

“What’s DRET?”

“Daybreak Research and Evaluation Team; it means ‘Cam’s bunch of smart people that help him figure stuff out.’ They’ve got a biowar-rigged Hummer that sprays its own tires with disinfectant and has an extensive air filter system, coming to pick you up in about half an hour.”

“For me? You said he wanted—”

“I think I’d better not go outside any more than I have to; in here, I’ve got it mostly sealed and as disinfected as I can get it, but out there, I could come down with nanoswarm or biotes, and be just as dead as any transistor radio. I’ll have to work mostly by letter and phone from now until there’s a better solution.”

“I don’t like the idea of leaving you here by yourself.”

She could hear him trying not to snap at her. “And I don’t like being confined to the house, but I think I’ll have to live with it. Meanwhile, I’m moderately well-armed, the place has power on to support me, I can fix most of what will break in here, it’s a lot safer from contamination, and we both have work to do. I’ll be here, you’ll be there, we’ll be fine. I’ll set out a dish basin with some disinfectant at the door; when you come back, be sure you dip your shoes and scour everything else.”

When Kai-Anne pulled the curtain aside to see what the noise was about, she jumped back; a man with a bat stood in their driveway. She looked again and saw that there were perhaps twenty people with bats and guns. She didn’t know what it was about but she knew she wanted a cop. She checked the landline; no luck. The cell phone was dead too.

“What’s going on, hon?”

Greg’s voice was low, trying not to wake the kids.

“Bunch of people outside with guns and bats,” she said, trying not to sound nearly as scared as she felt.

“Shit. We’re dealing with excessive citizen initiative here; remind me to thank the Acting President and the Moron Stream Media. Answer, but don’t open the door if they get up the nerve to knock. I gotta dress. Don’t go out there yet.”

What’s he mean, yet ? He can’t mean he’s going to—

They were shouting at each other out there, arguing about something or maybe nerving each other up. Please let that be an argument. The only person she could distinctly understand was the guy outside the door with the bat; he was yelling at people to calm down, we just gotta ask some questions, just some questions, let’s not guess till we asked our questions.

Greg came out in uniform; he could always be dressed in less than a minute. “My guess is they saw that hippie chick that nobody knows very well going in and out in the middle of the night, and decided there’s a terrorist here. I just need to have a little talk with them.” He looked her up and down for a moment and said, “You’re perfect.”

“I am?”

“Nobody’s going to believe you’re a terrorist in a Winnie the Pooh sweat suit with baby-puke stains. You’ll see. Come on.”

When he opened the door and stepped out, holding her hand, she saw one old guy in the back pointing the rifle, and thought, No, don’t, please listen—

Greg looked over the crowd. “Let me introduce myself. Captain Greg Redmond, U.S. Air Force. I fly an A-10 out of Davis-Monthan. Anybody here want to take a look at my service ID?”

The guy with the rifle lowered it; the crowd didn’t seem to know what to do.

“Anybody?”

Mr. Loud Baseball Bat set the bat down, looked at Greg’s ID carefully, and said, “It’s Air Force, and it’s him.”

“All right,” Greg said, “So we’ve established who I am. This is my wife, Kai-Anne, and the mother of our three children, who some of you have probably seen around the neighborhood. Most of you know it’s not easy being an Air Force wife, I guess, with all the moving and me being away a lot, and even harder being a mother of some little ones.

“Now, I’m just guessing, but I think you might be standing out on my lawn because somebody on the television, or the Internet, or something, said to watch out for people who were coming and going in the middle of the night before last, when our country was attacked. So I thought I’d just tell you all that Kai-Anne was picking me up from the base, because they let me come home for the night, after I was out flying all day because of that whole situation with Air Force Two. And because we’re all pretty worried about our country today, you were concerned that she might have been involved with this Daybreak thing, or maybe with the murder of our Vice President and you came here about that.”

By now all the bats were drooping, the handguns were holstered, and the rifles and shotguns pointed safely at the ground.

Greg nodded politely. “Well, what you have found is one tired Air Force pilot who wants some more sleep, and one Air Force wife with too much to do, who happens to have dreads and a couple tattoos. By the way, her husband likes all those. And three little kids sleeping. That’s all.

“If you’d called the police, they could have come out and looked and made sure it was okay, without all this disturbance for everyone. So I’m betting you’ll hear of other houses where people came and went late last night, because there’s always people that need medicine in the middle of the night, or people who pull a night shift, or even I guess guys sneaking back in after an affair.”

“How would you feel about that , Kai-Anne?” a voice called from the crowd.

“Anything I wanted done to him, I’d do myself,” she said.

There was a nervous, stuttering laugh, and people began to drift away. In a few minutes, the crowd was gone; a couple of older men came forward to thank Greg for his service and assure him they “didn’t mean nothing.”

“Did you recognize any of them?” Greg asked, when they were standing alone on the porch. “Remind me why we moved here.”

“You wanted to be somewhere safe for the kids, and I wanted to be someplace quiet, away from the base, where nobody would bother us or pay attention to how we lived.”

He started to laugh, and hugged her. Maybe life wasn’t all that bad, anyway.

For the moment, DRET turned out to be Heather’s Daybreak Working Group, including Arnie and Steve from Deep Black, plus Graham, minus Lenny and Agent Reynolds, plus a promised staff of as many as they needed as fast as they could hire them. They were all queuing up for lunch as Heather arrived. “The crew at your checkpoints looks pretty nervous,” Heather said to Cameron. “Have you had incidents?”

“I woke up once during the night when a drunk got obstreperous at a guard post outside, because he wanted to know why we had lights and he didn’t, and he’d apparently never heard of a Coleman lantern.”

“So you’re sleeping here now?”

“As much as I can persuade people, everyone will be soon,” Cam said. “You and Lenny would be very welcome, Graham moved in this afternoon, Crittenden and his wife will be here before tonight, and I think I’ve got Arnie and Allison talked into it. Jim Browder is insisting on hanging on to his big house way out past the Beltway for three reasons—one, he can’t get over the fact that it’s the house he always dreamed of; two, his wife would never leave it; and three, he’s an idiot.”

“No kidding. But we all are. I think Lenny will want to stay in his apartment until the power fails. And I won’t leave till he does. It’s not easy to adjust to the new conditions, is it?”