Project Reunion (19 page)

Instead I asked Dwayne, before Kyla finished turning off the cameras, “So are you from Connecticut, too, Dwayne?”

“No,” he said. Kyla got a great closeup of his expression. “I’m from Hoboken. My mother and little sisters are still there. Last I heard.” Hoboken New Jersey was just across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, nestled between the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels. Cam laid a consoling hand on his shoulder.

All four of us slept together under a down comforter in Cam and Dwayne’s big bed. There was a frost that night. Heat wasn’t on Cam’s list of priorities.

Chapter 14

Interesting fact: Despite the sensational fear factor of Ebola, it is estimated that more people died inside the New York epidemic borders of cholera, typhus, typhoid, dehydration from diarrhea, and starvation.

“I’ll be back at 4:30 to pick you up,” said Cam. We smiled and waved as he drove off to resurrect the next water pumping station.

“Why are we staying with Cam instead of Tom tonight?” Kyla asked suspiciously. Her skepticism was understandable. Cam had left us to wait at a tall chain-link fence, topped with loops of razor wire, under a lowering morning sky. Literally lowering – that sky looked closer and darker by the minute. An unfriendly looking Army guard stood just inside, glaring at us. Something about him reminded me of the photo of soldiers in the Greenwich garrison, bowling with a child’s skull.

Kyla pulled out her camera. “No filming!” the guard barked, and aimed his gun at her. She tucked her camera away, and we both held up our hands placatingly.

A harried-looking young woman approached. “Well, let them in,” she said, in exasperation. “Dee Baker and Kyla Osterwald? I’m Dr. Clarke Whitfield, Dr. Aoyama’s assistant. How do you do? Come this way.” Whitfield didn’t stop for breath, just glanced uneasily at the guard. She hoofed it as soon as we slipped in the gate. I knew from her CV that she was a post-doc, and thus probably around 30. But she was a very petite woman, who barely looked old enough for college. The once-white lab coat and severe short brown ponytail looked like a Halloween costume on her.

We scurried to catch up across a blank field of overgrown grass, toward a grey row of Quonset hut style temporary buildings. From outside the gate, I’d decided that the purpose of the empty field was a clear line of fire, and time to aim from the machine gun towers.

Whitfield slammed her way into the building, and kept us half-trotting along a central corridor. Judging from the sudden heavy drumming on the roof, we’d made it inside moments before the dark clouds let loose.

“Here,” she said at last, pushing open the last door to the left. “Tom,” she announced. She turned on her heel, and sped away.

“Tom!” I cried. “So good to see you!” I grinned warmly, before I took in the man before me.

I’d last seen him half a year ago, battered and bloody, drugged and asleep in the doctor’s camper of a gran caravan. He almost looked better back then. His face, once moon shaped, was hollow, his cheek bones clearly visible. The roots of his near-black hair had gone steel grey. He tried to stand and fumbled over his own chair wheels. I grabbed him by the elbow before he fell.

“It’s good to see you, Tom,” I repeated fiercely. I drew him into a hug, feeling his bony shoulders.

“Dee,” he said wonderingly. Once I let go, he sunk back into his chair.

“Oh! I have something for you,” I said, and rummaged in my pack. I handed him a manila envelope.

He opened it to pull out a crayon drawing from his daughter Charity. It showed a mommy and two kids, a smiling girl and frowning boy, on a big grey ship. And a man standing alone on a little island. Tom lovingly touched the crayon on the paper, that had touched his little girl. His fingernail had never regrown from his torture at HomeSec.

“She divorced me, you know. Beth.” Tears rolled down his cheeks. He didn’t seem to notice. “Did you see them? Charity and Dennis?”

“I’m sorry, no.” I shrugged. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me into Ark 7 again. “Do you remember Corporal Tibbs? He brought the envelope to me.”

“Cro-Magnon man,” Tom said. He’d called Tibbs that, while we were in the Ark 7 brig.

I snickered. “Funny, he remembers that, too. How are you, Tom?”

He rubbed his hair, and pointed a finger vaguely around the room. “This, is hard.” He nodded to himself and stroked the crayon tracks. The tears had stopped. “The guards. The misery. The hunger. It’s so very hard, Dee. That day, in the brig. I was so damned cocky then, you know? It all seemed so easy. They were just stupid. Cro-Magnon.”

“You saved a lot of lives, Tom,” I held his eye, willing him to believe that I believed in him. “You did it. You proved it could be done. Emmett will scale it up from here.”

Tom nodded, his whole body rocking. “Emmett hated me. I thought he was a cocky son of a bitch. He thought I was a cocky son of a bitch. We were both right.”

I held his shoulder and breathed deeply, slowly. I calmed his rocking. “Is it time for you to leave here, Tom? Maybe you need to come home to New Haven with me. Take a rest.”

“No. No!” he said, winding back up in agitation. “I’ll never leave here! There’s no end. No end!”

“Shh, Tom,” I crooned, and held him, rocking. “You succeeded, Tom. Thank you. You’re alright. Just cry if you need to. Cry it all the way out.”

Whitfield looked in on us, scurried away, and returned with a pill and a glass of water. “A mild sedative,” she offered. I stared her down until she placed them on the desk. She swallowed.

I needed to watch my temper here, I warned myself. Little Dr. Whitfield was the friendliest competent person we’d met yet. It likely wasn’t her fault that Tom was falling apart. She’d only tried to help with the sedative. The ions from the storm clouds were making me edgy as much as anything else, I told myself.

My little internal pep-talk wasn’t working. What I wanted to do was scream at her, demand to know whether she’d told Emmett how bad off Tom was.

I blew through my lips trying to cool off. She saw it and flinched.

“Are you in touch with Colonel MacLaren?” I asked, as mildly as I could.

“Colonel who?”

“Major Emmett MacLaren was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel,” I clarified. I continued to stroke Tom’s back slowly. He sat placidly now, his head resting against my stomach.

“Oh! Emmett. Yes. I spoke with him the day before yesterday. We’d just started training a new team. He had them sent to Greenwich. He’s left us very short-handed.”

“That was the team of medics from the Army National Guard, correct?” I prodded.

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Who were sent here to be trained for duty in Greenwich,” I completed the thought.

“He’s left us very short-handed,” she reiterated pissily.

“I don’t understand,” I said pointedly. “Did more people leave than Colonel MacLaren sent to you for training?”

“No,” she admitted. “I’m very busy.” She slammed back out of the room.

“Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to piss her off, Dee,” Kyla suggested.

I sighed. “Probably not.” My watch said it was almost 10 a.m. Only six and a half hours to go until Cam came back for us.

“I’m alright, Dee,” said Tom, surprising me. He sat up and scrubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “That picture from Charity just overwhelmed me for a minute. Sorry.” He tucked the drawing into the envelope and handed it to me. “Toss that on the bed for me?”

There was a cot in the corner, under a tangle of clothes and bedding. “You sleep in here? You really need to get out more, Tom.”

“I don’t trust Whitfield. I need to stay here and keep an eye on things. My work is all I have left now.”

“Tom? You still have Charity and Dennis left,” I said.

“I may never see them again.”

“Even so. They live. You protect them. You make the world a better place, for them.”

“You’re ruthless, Dee.”

I shrugged. “How long have you been popping sedatives?” I asked, picking up the capsule.

It was a gaudy pill, bright aqua with black codes printed on it. It didn’t look like any sedative I’d ever seen. Those tended to feature brand names, to pose as stylish drugs of choice. Kyla zoomed in for a closeup on it.

I trusted that her video cutting room bit bucket would be very full when this trip was over. Nothing yet this morning was going public, if I had any say about it. And I did have much to say about it. But I let her do her thing without comment.

“That’s a tetracycline antibiotic,” Tom said, frowning. He plucked the pill from my fingers. “She said it was a sedative?” He punched an intercom button on his desk. “Whitfield, get in here.”

I wondered how many hours a day the woman wasted on saying she was busy. But the little package of attitude was soon back and glaring down across Tom’s desk.

“Why did you bring me tetracycline?” Tom demanded. “Why did you tell Dee this was a sedative?”

“I didn’t want to embarrass you, Tom,” Whitfield declared. “He let typhus escape quarantine –”

“Bullshit,” I said in surprise. Her tells were all over the place, that she was lying. She was sweating, panicked, eyes darting all over the ceiling. “Look me in the eye and tell me that Tom has typhus,” I demanded.

“Who the hell are you!” Whitfield shrieked at me. “Some human interest reporter!” Clearly she considered this an insult, human interest news reporters some category of sub-human. “I’ll have you know that I hold an M.D. from Harvard, and a doctorate in epidemiology –”

“Yes, I’ve read your CV,” I cut her off. “Who I am, is Emmett MacLaren’s partner. Who I am, is a co-founder of Amenac. Who I am, is Tom’s friend.” I let that sink in a moment. Then I pushed inside her personal boundary, and pushed her down into a chair. It was a novel experience for me, to physically intimidate a smaller person. The sensation made my skin crawl.

“Now try again, Dr. Whitfield,” I demanded. “What the hell are you trying to pull here?”

What followed was a long and trying couple of hours. Dr. Clarke Whitfield was not cut out for life as an agent, and not nearly as clever as she supposed. I almost felt sorry for her.

-o-

“So we need to get word to the Greenwich garrison. These two medics we trained for them are actually agents for Pennsylvania,” Tom explained to the quarantine border commander, Captain Elizabeth Spelt. He handed her a slip with the names. He’d summoned Spelt to his office when we were done extracting what information we could.

Spelt studied Whitfield in puzzlement. “What were they trying to accomplish?”

“Discredit the quarantine procedures,” I supplied. “Prevent the relief of New York by creating public fear of the refugees.”

“That would carry the death penalty,” Spelt observed to Whitfield. “Inciting public panic.”

“They planned to infect people with typhus, just before release outside the quarantine zone,” Tom elaborated. “Bio-terrorism, not just rumors.”

Spelt’s eyes widened in horror. She pulled out her phone. “Bridget? Beth Spelt. You know that group of medics we sent? We need to detain all of them for questioning. Separate out these two.” She rattled off their names from the scrap of paper. “Hold them for HomeSec.... That’s fine, it’s a capital charge... We believe they plotted with Pennsylvania to release typhus into Connecticut via post-quarantine refugees... To stop Project Reunion... You’ll contact MacLaren?... The agent here was Dr. Clarke Whitfield, Tom Aoyama’s assistant... Thanks, Bridget. And – sorry.”

I ached to tell MacLaren myself, instead of going through proper channels. But he was far away and buffered by many uniformed layers. I let the cog-works do their cranking.

“What are you going to do with me?” asked Whitfield pitifully.

“Hand you over to the Coast Guard on tomorrow’s boat,” Spelt replied. “I imagine they’ll deliver you to HomeSec in New London.” She summoned guards to take Whitfield away until then.

Tom shook his head at Whitfield. “What did you hope to accomplish, Clarke?” It was a rhetorical question, perhaps for Spelt’s benefit. Whitfield had already told us that.

“I could have done a lot of good with a properly funded lab!” she screeched. “Not this half-assed, sorry excuse for mud-hole! With proper food! Pennsylvania has drugs and supplies!”

The guards came, trussed her up, and dragged her away.

My phone rang, startling me. I didn’t realize it would work here in the quarantine complex. “Emmett! It’s so good to hear from you!”

He was in a noisy place, with machine thrumming and plenty of voices in the background. “Hey, darlin’. Just got off the phone with the quarantine commander in Greenwich. She told me about the medics. Well done! Thank you. How’s Tom?”

“He’s OK. He’s right here. Wanna talk to him?”

“God, no. I’ve got people coming up from CDC. Tell Tom I’ll send one to replace Whitfield. It’ll take a few days.”