Fire Will Fall (33 page)

"I'll take what I can get," I said.

"At some point you'll have to sign all the paperwork and take an oath of secrecy. Then, it becomes a crime to repeat classified information to anyone on the outside. If you breach, you wouldn't just be fired, you'd be prosecuted. You sure you're up for this? Be careful what you wish for. I think the hardest thing for our agents is trying to stay connected with the rest of the world when there's an obvious disconnect. We have secrets we can't share with wives, can't breathe in our sleep. That's too hard for some. It's why I chose never to remarry. We'll tell you bits and pieces that you'll need to know, and I'll explain all of this to Cora, too."

I tried to keep my face blank, not tip them off that she was not in love with the idea of being included. She hid her emotions so well at times...
Well, it isn't my job to speak for her. Let Henry speak for her from here on in.

"First, let's give you some basics." Alan gestured at some rocking chairs, and we sat in them. "Two things to know if you're going to help out USIC. First, be patient. Everything takes longer than you think it's going to take. Second, don't ask a lot of questions. We don't ask questions unless we need to know something that affects our little circle of responsibilities. It's better that way, that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Because if one of us got picked up by a ShadowStrike operative—God forbid, but they're close by somewhere—we can't reveal under duress what we don't know."

Griffith's Landing. Right across the water. I can almost smell them from here.
That brought on a thousand questions, but I had no trouble holding on to them as a shadow appeared over my right shoulder. My insides jumped, but the agents had seen Cora coming. The house was like a steel ship. Nothing made a sound.

So, she had presented herself for this meeting, too. This is how "give a girl enough rope" works. My generosity about Henry made her feel guilty, and this was her idea of penance due. Or maybe I wasn't cutting her enough of a break. Maybe she thought of Shahzad and Tyler.

"Did you lock the door at the top of the stairs?" Alan asked.

"I pulled it tight, yes," she said.

"The security code is three-one-seven-one-five," he said. "Can you both remember that?"

I nodded. Three odds, out of order, with ones in between.

"If you leave that door open more than ten seconds, you'll set off the alarm. The alarm will ring in the house, and it will ring to our cell phones, too. That door stays closed at all costs. For one, Rain and Owen are, well, different from you two."

Cora sat and looked like she had at her mom's funeral—no emotion showing.

"I don't want them walking into potentially upsetting information that they haven't asked to hear. And second, the historical society still has access to this building. Take it from us: You wouldn't believe how people gossip, even people with a good deal of education and a sense of charity."

My eyes rolled Cora's way, and this time I made sure she saw it.
No Henry down here, babes. My cave.
I sensed uneasiness wafting off her, though she was better than I would have thought at maintaining her cool on the outside. For someone who could get visibly shaken at St. Ann's by accidentally hurting someone's feelings, she was pretty good in hearing lines like "they're close by." She hadn't missed it.

"You saw Hodji, I take it," Mike said to her.

"Yes." I thought she might shudder, but her eyebrows bounced up and down once. "He just refused a tranquilizer. Hmm..."

Under stress, she could even make them laugh. I wanted to shake her, rattle her, tell her she'd make a perfect CC. Obviously, from the years of living with her mother-the-drug-addict she had developed nerves of steel for facing anxious situations.

"He's keyed up right now," Alan agreed. "He'll conk out on his own, and you won't even have to remember he's here until tomorrow."

I took it their car ride wasn't a joyful reunion.

Alan whipped out a small notebook and settled in to his seat. "The purpose of Mike's and my daily briefing is to catch up on any news since the day before. He goes to meetings in North Jersey, sometimes New York, and if I'm not there, he tells me what went on. I stick down here and report to him on anything new from Trinity Falls, and now Griffith's Landing is in my jurisdiction, too."

He turned from us to look at Mike. "Yesterday we told the local police to stand down and have our CDC guys contain the monkey corpses—just as 'a routine precaution' after Trinity Falls. We tried two different containment procedures before packing them in a steel drum. It was oozing something that ate through the garbage bags they were found in." He swallowed hard. I didn't dare look at Cora.

"When we got it to our guy from the CDC, who's still at St. Ann's, he opened the drum in the morgue, and guess what was in it?"

"Pudding?" Mike asked. Cora cleared her throat.

"Try smoking liquid. Smoking liquid and bones. Anyway, we're telling the Humane Society that it's an emerging infectious strain of tularemia, which is close to the truth. It is an
intentionally mutated
strain of tularemia, a WMD. The cops, the Humane Society, they don't need to know it's a designer germ, created with the intention of wiping out a convention."

Cora didn't move. I tried not to ball up my fists.

"The CDC said the germ is beyond our worst nightmares. In humans, the strain has an incubation period of only two days. The strain that infected Tyler and Shahzad had an incubation period of ten days. This new one is a killer, and in the worst of ways, which we can verify by what happened to the lab monkeys. Monkeys and humans have absorption and digestive commonalities. Hence, we could assume that people's skin would bubble, they'd lose hair, and they'd grow disoriented, all while their insides are festering. The strain Tyler and Shahzad had didn't affect the major organs. For one, they neither drank it nor sat immersed in it. This one, if drunk, as in tap water, or absorbed through the skin, as in a ten-minute shower or a visit to the water park, will basically cause people to ... to burn to death from the inside out. That's the bad news."

Cora cleared her throat again, and it took all I had not to reach out and touch her.

"I've got the good news," Mike said. "We've alerted the top executives at Ryder Fitzgerald that their convention may perhaps be a target. Nobody from RF is going to get hurt. Same with the owner of the amusement park. He's Mafiosi. Supposedly. At any rate, he's good at keeping secrets."

Alan turned to Cora and me. "Ryder Fitzgerald is the aeronautical engineering firm that was planning to hold a convention Memorial Day weekend at the Griffith's Landing Convention Center. We're certain it's the target," he said. "We're just not saying that to the local jurisdiction. Hodji Montu was on his cell with Imperial before he even forced his way off the delayed flight. The Kid and Tyler had sent him a major script between Omar and VaporStrike about monkey corpses being buried in Colony Two. Along with some other captured chatter, it's a
bingo.
"

Cora stared into the wall with a look of horror so subtle that I'm sure I was the only one to get it. But if she wasn't sharing her little agonies, I was done digging for them.

Mike carried on. "I got us some backup as of today. Two dozen extra USIC agents from North Jersey and New York will be in Griffith's Landing by noon. They're unknowns to ShadowStrike. They can be planted in public around Griffith's Landing and carry hidden cameras."

Alan nodded like he had expected that. "So, here's the game for now. We go there and figure out where these hoods are hiding. The chatter Tyler and Shahzad scripted implied strongly that there are foot soldiers in Griffith's Landing looking to ID some of us as part of their intelligence. So we have to be careful while
we're
trying to ID
them.
Fortunately, Griffith's Landing is not huge, like Wildwood and Ocean City. What they call the 'summer district' is a likely area—crowded, slightly run-down, with buildings on top of buildings. Lots of nooks and one-bedroom places to hide in."

"How are we going to find them?" I asked.

Mike pressed the tips of his fingers together, then spread his arms. "There's no easy way. We have a half-dozen photos of the guys we
think
might be involved, based on previous intelligence reports. We have old photos that go with the few names we have. Our agents will simply be out strolling, but they're strapped with small video cams, the size of an orange pip, and wires so we can hear each other. They'll be watching CVS, Superfresh, places like that. Everybody eats and bathes. We'll watch who strolls past the convention center. We'll watch who comes out of houses in the summer district."

"Sounds like a crapshoot," I said.

"It is. We're not gods. This is how we operate. But we've got a couple of pretty solid IDs, we think."

He clicked open his briefcase and took out a couple black-and-white eight-by-ten photos. One was a profile shot of a guy walking down a busy city street. From the older buildings in the background, I got an idea it was taken in Germany. The other shot was a full face of the guy Cora had shot on the boardwalk on Saturday. He held them up side by side.

"For one, we think this is a match," Mike said.

I bent forward to study the pictures, trying like hell to ignore my guilty conscience. I had pushed Cora up so close to a terrorist that she could have reached out and touched his face. I turned slowly to stare at her.

She was sitting with one foot under her, her hands dangling over the ends of the rocking chair's armrests. But it was like she had turned to stone. She responded to my staring by glancing into my lap and away again.

"We think this is Abdul Khadisha, or one of his many aliases. Comes to us via Egypt, via Kuwait, via Jordan chronologically, going backwards ... most of these charming gentlemen no longer claim a homeland. Online, he's been using the log-in Pasco."

Mike then stuck a pile of older photos in Cora's lap. She merely glanced down without touching them.

"I'd like your job for the afternoon to be looking through these and trying to match them with any faces in the photos you took yesterday."

Mike watched her, noticing how she hadn't moved, and she finally picked them up and began leafing through them.

"We're only giving you guys safe jobs," Alan said. "Very safe. I'm not going anywhere near the convention center or the amusement pier, because my face has been all over the TV. All I'm doing is sitting in the video truck and watching the live feed from the undercover agents who will be up there in the neighborhoods. Scott, I'd like your good eye. I've known you since you were a kid, know you never miss a trick. Look through those photos yourself, then see who you can ident from the truck with me."

I nodded, and with that, Cora passed me the photos, stood up in a trancelike state, and moved down the corridor to her photo lab. I coughed loudly to cover for her—it looked weird. But when we heard her flipping through items, it occurred to me that maybe she wasn't just freaking out.

We found her looking through the film by holding it up to her red light. A couple of the early shots she had taken were of two men who had been on the boardwalk. Their faces came clear in the third frame. In all four frames, they were watching the convention center, while everyone else on the boardwalk was drawn to the amusement park.

She pointed. "I shot these before we went into the pier, so they weren't with the ones I showed Mr. Tiger yesterday. It could be nothing, but when I was developing these, I remembered how one of the bigger rides had just made that huge noise of air releasing as the ride sprung straight downward. It was loud. It caught the attention of everyone. Except these two were deeply engaged in conversation, probably to do with the convention center."

Touché.

Mr. Tiger brought his face close, his eyes wide. "Can you make us prints of these? The first shot is pretty clear. We have specialists who can sometimes get a computer to confirm matches, even if the subjects change their features significantly."

"Yes."

"You've got a lot to do, Cora. But don't overload yourself. As soon as you start to get tired, walk away from it," Mr. Tiger said, but he didn't mention having any guys on his crew who could still develop old-fashioned film.

"She's got other plans this afternoon," I said, so easily it was downright vindictive, and I saw her throat bob outward as she swallowed a bucket of guilt. I felt torn. I was pushing her hard. I had put her in harm's way unintentionally. But I was losing patience with her scared-puppy routine when I could see she had some talents—everything from keeping secrets to being good under pressure to taking photos—that could help catch the guys who did this to us.

So she had been attacked by a terrorist in the ICU of St. Ann's. So,
I
had been in the ICU unit, too, with the guy who tried to inject her.
I
had helped wrestle him away from her.
I
had the presence of mind to disconnect her from everything that dripped, and all she had to do was lie there. She ought to remember that. And if she was mad about me putting her in danger, well,
get a grip.
Our health was in danger anyhow.

"Scott, after whatever medication it is you take next, you can be gone for how long?" Alan asked, and I looked at my watch.

"I've got something in twenty minutes, and then I can be gone for three hours," I said, which wasn't exactly true. I had a semiharmless dose of sulfadiazine, a simple antibiotic that prevents brain inflammation, two hours later, but I figured I could get Marg to slip it to me to take on the road. What the State didn't know wouldn't hurt it.

"We'll leave then."

Mike and Alan headed back up the stairs, and I made a show of studying prints, pulling some down as if they were of special interest. Really, I just wanted to watch Cora squirm.

CORA HOLMAN
MONDAY, MAY 6, 2002
10:02
A.M.
DARKROOM