City Under the Moon (10 page)

If only they were dogs.

After the incident at Bellevue, fourteen animal attacks had been reported. Four dead, and at least three dozen injuries.

Christ, you’d think a couple more of them would’ve had the decency to die.

So there would be at least three dozen werewolves tonight—and how many unaccounted for?

On New Year’s Fucking—

“Special Agent… Tilda’s coe?”

Here was her State Department contact, an Ivy League pimple popper in his daddy’s suit, trying to look important between long hours of fetching coffee and opening mail. His shifty eyes said he’d prefer buying women to charming them.

“Til-
das
-cow,” she warned him. “Like ‘kill jazz now.’”

“Ah. So do you hate jazz?”

“No. I hate my name being mispronounced.”

She ignored his name and used the remnants of her sandwich to avoid shaking his hand. Since he was in no rush, she led him through the makeshift security tent and into the lobby of the General Assembly Building, a cavernous, echo-filled circus populated with self-important people looking at self-important artwork. A wide marble stairwell began to their right and made a dramatic and highly impractical U-turn, becoming a swash of green that arced above the hall to crash into the lowest of three white cantilevered balconies. If that said something about diplomacy, it was over the head of this Ugly American.

Just beyond the metal detectors, where the guards made a big show of taking her gun, she and her gofer of state were greeted by a stolid member of the UN’s Department of Safety & Security. He escorted them underneath the balcony and through a secure door.

They took a flight of stairs down into a nexus of underground tunnels spanning the entire United Nations complex. Among the federal government, this facility was described in nigh-mythic terms. The UN’s security measures were necessarily highly secretive, but legend had it that there might not be a safer place in the world than the long-term doomsday shelter underneath the UN: If a nuclear bomb dropped right on top of the plaza, partygoers in the basement would barely feel the shake. She thought it was an absurd breach of security that they had such a facility hidden beneath American soil, but the rules weren’t hers to make.

The UN security hub was a sprawling, curved theater reminiscent of the General Assembly Hall. Packed with state-of-the-art tech, this was one of the few real-life government rooms that looked the way they’d imagine it in the movies. A computer-generated map of the world occupied the focal point in place of the podium, glittering with diplomatic conditions, situations and ops data. A network of monitors on the left curved wall displayed profiles of specific diplomats, probably those staying on site. At the back of the theater, where Tildascow had entered, an electronic board detailed security schedules and shift commanders. Leave it to the UN to use an LED monitor where a white board would work better.

“Special Agent Tildascow, I’m Daniel Milano, Chief of Desk for Security Coordination.” He extended a firm, no-nonsense handshake.

“Good to meet you,” she said. He couldn’t see it, but she was casing the dual-door weapon caches stationed between each of the room’s four entrances.
Handprint locks, smart stuff.

“We’ve been reviewing the tapes for December 29th, the night of Mrs. Cooke’s attack. Nothing jumped out as overly suspicious, but we were asked to show you everything.”

Tildascow followed Milano, grateful that they didn’t have to slow down so he could sniff her. The tapes were queued up on sequential monitors. A media tech ran the deck for what seemed like a rehearsed presentation. The UN Security Force was solid.

Milano directed Tildascow to the first monitor, where they’d prepared various angles of Cooke emerging from her room in the Secretariat Building. The raw footage was marked with time code.

KAM5422 UNSECINT 122910 21:56:10 showed Cooke negotiating the baby carriage through her room’s door. KAM5418 caught her stepping through the hallway. On, KAM5401, she pushed the stroller onto the elevator.

“She was staying here?” Tildascow asked.

“Temporarily. She was to move into the Millenium Hotel on the second of January. The hotel was booked for New Year’s Eve.”

Indeed, Tildascow had seen Cooke’s reservation on the computer at the Millenium Hotel. Everything appeared to be on the up and up, but that’s what she’d expected. Despite the suspicious interview, she’d all but eliminated Cooke as a potential perpetrator of this… whatever this was. After all, the woman had been shredded to within inches of her life.

No, Cooke was the first infected, but she wasn’t the one doing the infecting. Still… her prominent standing, the brazen location, the missing kid… it all seemed too measured for a random attack. She was part of a plan.

And there had to be a trail. It started somewhere. If not from Cooke, then maybe the UN.

“Nothing out of the ordinary the whole night?”

“Nothing at all in the interiors,” said Milano. “We’ve left a message for our nightshift custodial manager, but he hasn’t returned and he has tonight off for the holiday. When we hear from him, we’ll put him in touch with you. You can feel free to examine our surveillance footage at your leisure, but we’ve prepared a time-lapse presentation for you, with the exclusion of classified areas, of course.”

“Of course.”

He’d made the time-lapse video sound like a couples’ massage. And sure enough, it held nothing of interest. Security patrolling, custodians cleaning, administrators administrating, and a graduate student reviewing artwork for a thesis.

“Did anything out of the ordinary happen outside?” Tildascow asked.

“Well, there’s no barometer for ‘ordinary’ on the streets of New York. We have a constant flow of eccentrics—homeless persons, tourists, activists, drugged-up wackos and, well, New Yorkers. Nothing in particular stood out, but we do have time-lapse footage.”

“Let me see the exterior of the Secretariat Building, where Cooke exited.”

She watched carefully as the tech sped through the tape at high speed until he found Cooke.

“Wait—go back.”

He rolled the tape back to KAM0233 UNSECEXT 122910 21:09:10, an hour before Cooke emerged through the security gate.

At that moment, a man steps in front of the camera and pauses before moving on.

“Have you ever seen that man before?”

Milano hummed as he thought. “No, not that I recall. We logged him, but I couldn’t see how he might pertain to an animal attack.”

Tildascow seized the image. “Play it again.”

He moves with the precision of a dancer, his keen eyes staring directly into the camera.

She’d seen this man before.

As Milano droned on, she delved into her recollection of the Bellevue Hospital’s security footage, recreating the images through spatial mnemonics. There was Holly Cooke, her master locus. There was Dr. Kenzie. Each detail evoked the next: Nurse Nancy Laurio, the EMTs, the IVs and the monitors, the walkway…

As she hunted him in her memory, Tildascow studied his image on the monitor. Age 38 to 45. 5’ 10”. Dirty and unkempt, suggesting homelessness, but with an air of confident intelligence.

Dichotomies always held interesting tales.

Rooted determination in his eyes, which were so pale they nearly glowed beneath his burly eyebrows. His beard was thick and lightly salted, but his hair was a hood of sheer black. The utility muscles on his lithe body were shaped by labor, not the gym. Americans with this man’s disposition rarely did manual labor. Light skin and bright eyes suggested she should start with a European origin.

His clothing was patchwork and dark. His formal button-down shirt was heavily weathered, likely worn for weeks. But it may have been hand-made. Dark pants, dark shoes. She couldn’t make the cut of the cuffs, which were usually the most useful detail in pinpointing the etymologies of clothing.

More often than not, the prime characteristic of a mark—a thick beard, bold sunglasses, a dark hat—was an intentional misdirect, a countermeasure too loud to be useful. Given this leisurely amount of time to study the still image, Tildascow preferred to examine the proverbial elephant last.

This man had a plain white tee shirt stretched tightly over his formal shirt. Something was haphazardly written on the tee, probably with a black marker. It was impossible to read in this distant, grainy shot.

And now she found him in the hospital footage.

He’d been skulking near the ambulance entrance in Bellevue’s ER, observing the doctors as they worked on Holly Cooke. She had mistaken the tee shirt for scrubs and written him off as a janitor.

Again, he stared right at the security camera. In this image, the text on his shirt was far from legible.

Three stacked lines. The middle contained only one letter. The top and bottom were similar in length, each four or five letters.

That was her man.

And he had a message for her.

Four

President’s Briefing Room

The White House

December 31

1:45 p.m.

President Weston took his trademark deep breath and settled into his seat. The briefing room’s soft overhead lighting, blue carpets, neutral walls, and mahogany paneling were designed to calm stress. If only it worked.

Rebekkah Luft had just delivered a comprehensive summary of the security routine in Times Square, using a John Madden-style telestrator to draw circles and arrows on satellite maps. Sadly, Madden had the technology long before the government.

“Options?” Weston asked. As always, he posed the question first to his Chief of Staff, Teddy Harrison. They’d met almost 30 years ago in the bullpen of the Harvard Law Review, and their relationship spanned business ventures, politics, and family life. They were each other’s best men. When they coined the phrase, “I couldn’t do it without him,” they were thinking of Teddy “Bear” Harrison.

“Calling the event off wouldn’t deter the revelers at this point,” Teddy lamented. “They’re already in transit. If we restrict access to Times Square, they’ll spill out all over the city in a less manageable manner.”

Weston’s National Security Council was seated around the long mahogany table. The dunderheaded but attractive Vice President Allison Leslie; Secretary of State Anthony Michaelson; Ronald Greenberg, Secretary of Defense; Attorney General Michael Shinick; Darryl Turner, the Director of National Intelligence; and Teddy Harrison. He also had Dr. Jessica Tanner, the Director of the CDC, via closed circuit on a monitor.

He looked to General Alan Truesdale, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his military advisor. “We have a sufficient military presence?”

“We’ll have spec ops all ready in place for the ball drop,” Truesdale said. “There isn’t enough time for a Rapid Deployment Force. NORTHCOM is scrambling, but we might not make it till daybreak.”

That was followed by the loudest silence Weston had ever heard.

The presidential briefing room was part of the five thousand square feet of intelligence complex beneath the West Wing, which included the Situation Room, several conference rooms and the all-important Watch Center, where round-the-clock teams monitored worldwide events.

At the moment it felt like a life raft.

Luft chimed in with some optimism: “Mister President, it’s been two hours since any fresh reports of injuries. NORTHCOM, the FBI and the CDC have been working closely with the NYPD, and they feel confident they’ve detained everyone who might have been infected last night. It may very well be contained.”

“They
hope
it’s been contained,” interjected Jessica Tanner. Weston had her pegged as an alarmist, but that was her job. “If not, it will spread fast. If there were two last night, there may be a dozen tonight. Tomorrow there could be hundreds.”

“The
timing
of this,” Weston lamented.

“Too perfect to be a coincidence,” agreed Truesdale. “This is by design.”

“But whose design?”

The silence returned.

Jessica jumped back in. “We have to quarantine the city, sir.”

Murmurs passed across the table.

“We can’t do that in time,” said Leslie, the VP.

“We can prepare for a safe evacuation. The infected will be easy to identify if we have properly secure conditions—“

Leslie interjected: “That would disrupt every facet of life, not only in the city, but the entire country—“

“The disruption is already here. We can’t ignore it.” Jessica had come prepared with a white board behind her seat. “It will be like the Lytic Cycle, the same method of reproduction as the virus. Think of Manhattan as a blood cell.”

She drew a circle on the board.

“A cell that has been penetrated by a virus.”

Small stars inside the circle.

“In its incubation period, the virus replicates within the cell.”

Arrows from the stars, each pointing to two new ones.

“Two become four. Four become eight. This is what our werewolves will do every night. In fact, it’ll be even faster as each one leaves whatever number of infected—maybe dozens—in its wake. Once the virus is strong enough to assault the larger body…” She drew a sunburst exploding from the cell, followed by arrows spilling out in every direction. “It will become a global threat.”

“Good Lord,” Weston muttered. He’d been so preoccupied with security for the revelers in Times Square that he hadn’t considered the bigger picture.

“It
must
be contained,” Jessica implored.

“We’ll make arrangements.” Weston nodded to Truesdale, who silently excused himself. Teddy ducked out as well.

“Dr. Tanner,” said Luft, “our werewolf expert said that only silver bullets could kill them?”

“Yes, well, our patient seems to have newly manifested a severe allergic reaction to silver and silver compounds. This morning, we witnessed a rash forming on her skin almost immediatley upon epidermal contact with her own sterling silver necklace. We tested a sample of her blood against pure silver, and the result was catastrophic to—“

“So that’s a yes?” Greenberg interrupted.

“Yes. Exposure to silver kills the virus-infected cell and sends self-destruction orders to nearby infected cells. The virus begins to consume its host.”