Year Zero (24 page)

“But Ochs told us there were no more relics,” she said.

“Probably just grabbed what he could and hightailed it back here.”

“It’s been months,” she said. “Months. We need those relics.”

“As I recall, he didn’t want to go in the first place.”

In fact, Miranda had sent him kicking and screaming to Washington. She had deported Ochs, however briefly, so that he could know how it felt. On top of that, it had been a trivial, foolish slap at Cavendish and his terrorism. She should never have done it. It made her feel dirty. And Ochs had returned within three days, more hateful than ever.

Miranda surrendered. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll talk to him. Do I get to finish what I was doing first?”

“I interrupted you?”

“A half hour, Captain.”

He closed the door after himself.

Miranda tried to finish the assay reports, but the little nude and
Himalayan Flora
kept distracting her. The statue was a marvelous, primitive thing, brazen and odd, and absolutely true to its own sense of proportions. Had he carved it himself, or was it a bit of pawn or theft? And the book…a piece of magic, full of hints.

Then the Captain was back, rapping on her door, the visitor in tow. The Captain’s sporting tone was gone. He was stern and formal, and made the man keep well back from Miranda’s desk. The impostor’s hands were bound with flex cuffs. He had the wide shoulders to carry another thirty or forty pounds in better times. He wore a frayed, but relatively white shirt. He limped. The taped glasses in his photo had been replaced along the way by thick horn-rims that seemed to be the wrong prescription. He kept blinking, trying to focus. The road showed in the goggle marks on his weathered face. Until this morning, he had worn a beard. His cheeks were chapped, his jaw pale with shaving nicks like ants on his throat.

The Captain didn’t offer him a chair. The man didn’t seem to mind at all.

Miranda stayed sitting. She didn’t introduce herself. She tapped the blood log. “Dr. Bowen, you have a credibility gap,” she said.

The stranger didn’t waste a moment. “Dr. Bowen died in Fairbanks seventeen months ago,” he said. “That’s what I was told.”

“Did you kill him?” asked the Captain. Miranda was startled. She hadn’t thought of that.

The man was unperturbed. “That’s one thing I’ve never done,” he answered.

“Who are you?”

Again, not a hesitation. “Nathan Lee Swift.”

“How do we know that’s real?”

“You don’t. I’m not sure what it matters, anyway.”

He was right, thought Miranda. One name or another, he was just another piece of human driftwood. Some people would have minded the insignificance. He seemed to take it in the nature of things.

“So you’re not a physician,” she said.

“No.” He didn’t appear to feel very guilty about the deception.

“You forged your way across America,” she said. She wanted to shake him a little. “People believed in you. You healed them. They thought you healed them.”

He agreed with her. “I know. I couldn’t believe it, either. It was like they were waiting for a way to heal themselves. I was an excuse, that’s all.”

“They let you deliver their babies. Twins. Or is that part of your hoax, too?”

His eyes flickered across the array of his possessions on her desk. He saw the scraps of himself, and, again, didn’t seem to mind. “There were more than them,” he said. “I was lucky.” His hands opened unconsciously. They formed a little cup. “The babies delivered themselves. No complications. All I did was catch.”

“You had the gall….” she started. “What if something had gone wrong?”

“I agree,” he said. “It was humbling. I’ve never been so afraid.”

“How many?” asked the Captain.

“Babies?” he said. “With the twins, eleven. They’re all over the place.”

For a minute, Miranda was surprised like the Captain. “People are still having babies?” she said.

The man gave her a funny look.

“There’s a plague,” she expanded. “That’s just cruel.” The birthrate at Los Alamos had bottomed out in the last half year. Anymore it was considered prideful to inflict such suffering on a child. It was one more symptom of their hopelessness. Throughout the city, women’s hormonal cycles had been affected, as if their very wombs shunned fertility.

“People think you’re going to make everything better,” he replied.

Miranda looked sharply at him to see if it was an insult. “But you don’t think so,” she said.

“I doubt that matters,” he said.

She flipped open one of the letters. “And you treated a militia fighter?”

“Sewed him up. So he could kill some more people, probably. That was at a river camp near Chattanooga. They told me it’s the oldest river on earth.”

“You helped a killer,” she reiterated.

“They think they’re doing the right thing. Everyone thinks that. The right thing.”

“But they’re traitors,” she tried. From these heights, the chaos seemed so unnecessary. It offended people in Los Alamos that America—the method of it, the system—could come unraveled so completely.

“Be careful,” he said. “That’s a popular word, traitor. It’s what they say every time they pull their triggers.”

She sniffed. “You perpetrated fraud everywhere you went,” she said.

“It got me here.”

She opened
Himalayan Flora
with the tip of her pen, purposely irreverent. “There are passport stamps from Mongolia and China and Nepal.”

“Keepsakes,” he said. “The customs posts were empty.”

“You didn’t come through Asia,” she said. He couldn’t have. It was like the dark side of the moon.

He didn’t argue the point. He didn’t care if she believed it. “I brought the Smithsonian specimens,” he said. “Does anyone know what I’m talking about?”

“They’re not important anymore,” Miranda told him. In fact, any one of the relics might prove entirely relevant. But she wasn’t going to give herself away yet. That wasn’t how one bargained.

“I brought them,” he repeated. “I want to cut a deal.”

Miranda was momentarily put out. She was bluffing, and even if it showed, it was not his place to say so. “They might have had value months ago….”

“I came for my daughter,” he stated.

She hesitated. Could it be so simple? “Grace,” she said.

His fingers curled shut. He blinked through the coke-bottle lenses.

Miranda glanced at the Captain to see if this was his idea. The coincidence of two fathers each heartsick seemed too coincidental. But the Captain’s surprise looked genuine.

“She’s here?” asked Miranda.

“I hope.”

“Someone told you she’s here?”

“Not exactly.”

“Let me get this straight. You trick your way across the country using a false I.D. You hold government property for ransom. You threaten our attempt to find a cure, and you crash my work day. Just to come fishing?”

“I see your point,” he readily admitted. He seemed a little embarrassed by the slimness of it. But he stood his ground.

What part of him was real? she wondered. If the evidence was true, then he’d been racing one step ahead of the plague for months. What sights had he seen? What world was left out there? No one knew anymore. Their eyes on the world had blinked shut as the technology failed. Batteries had gone dead, generators had run out of fuel. The satellites showed anarchy at best. There were no more spy-plane overflights of Canada or Mexico, or even Atlanta. The astronauts on board the space shuttle had mutinied. No longer content to remain in orbit as a backup disc to the species, they had set off for Earth…and disappeared. The manned recons were increasingly tentative and local, especially after the Navy’s global mapping expedition had ended in silence and disaster. So far as they knew, the Captain’s daughter had never reached the shores of America. Yet this scrawny, stubborn vagabond was claiming to have passed through it all, on a hope?

“What if she’s not here?” asked Miranda.

“Odds are, she’s not.” He said it without a hint of resignation.

The Captain did a double take, Miranda couldn’t help but see it. Shoulder to shoulder, the two men were dealing with similar loss. But, for an instant, the older man seemed oddly lifted by the younger one.

“Half the country’s missing.” She put some aggravation in her voice.

He waited for her point. He didn’t seem to care if the rest of the world was missing. Indeed, if his story was real, he knew better than they what missing meant. “You could search forever,” she said.

“That’s okay,” he answered softly.

Right there, he captured her. That was not his intention; it could not have been. Miranda would never have guessed she herself was vulnerable. It just happened.

She had grown weary. They all had. Their suicides and orgies and petty hatreds were forms of surrender. Each day they were giving up a little more, getting ready to seal themselves away in her father’s underground sanctuary and hide out until the plague was finished ravishing the planet. No one believed in forever anymore. No one spoke hope.

We need him.

“This isn’t a missing persons bureau,” she declared.

“I’m not the pizza delivery boy, either,” he said.

It was almost reckless, almost insolent. Almost. But there was no pride behind the chutzpah. He was just here for his daughter.

“How do I know you won’t betray me? We’ve got no evidence this package of artifacts even exists.”

“There’s those letters from the Smithsonian.” He pointed helpfully with one finger, and both hands came up, attached at the wrist.

“Pieces of paper.” Miranda nudged at his forged blood book. “Fictions.”

“You’ll find a tree,” he said. “Go forty feet north of mile marker 3.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Off Highway 502. It’s all there. In saddlebags. They’re not buried. Look up in the branches.”

“You said they were buried.”

“I lied. Again.”

Miranda looked at the Captain, and his eyebrows were knit into a single black V. He was taken off guard, too. As an afterthought, he took a notepad from his pocket and started writing. He spoke into a cellphone.

Nathan Lee gave her a pleasant smile. “Now we’ve got that out of the way.”

The smile annoyed her. She wanted to scold him. What did he have to smile about? He’d left himself no chips. He’d gained nothing, except to throw the question of trust back on her. She’d made no promises. But now it was her in the position of betraying him. Then Miranda realized he knew exactly what he was doing. She’d made an issue of trust, so now he was using it against her.

“I could wait until they confirm your…confession.” She made her voice frosty. “But I’ll go ahead and check the registry.” She slid the keyboard closer. “It’s only for Los Alamos,” she warned.

“That’s fine.”

She spoke as she typed. “Grace Swift.”

“Probably not,” he said.

He was right. “Well, what then?”

“There was a divorce.” Miranda backspaced over the Swift. He craned to see her screen, but the Captain moved him back with a gesture. “Try Ochs,” he said.

Miranda’s fingers froze. “Not David Ochs,” she blurted.

His eyes lit up. They positively burned. Then he made himself clement and mild behind the clunky horn-rims again. “So he’s made himself safe,” he said.

She glanced at the Captain, confounded. “He has a wife and child?” The executioner had a family?

“A sister,” Nathan Lee corrected her. “She remarried. She might have taken another name. But start with Ochs. Please.”

What kind of charade was this? Clearly the man had followed Ochs here. He’d skillfully used documents that were over a half year old to gain access to the Mesa, and maybe that was all there was to it, one more opportunist trying to slide through the fence. More ominously, Ochs may have summoned him, an ally, the last thing Los Alamos needed. But why use her, why not go straight through Ochs? Cover? A sting? On the other hand, he could be who he claimed to be, which verged on nothing. There was only one sure way to find out.

“Captain,” she said, “lock this man up.”

*  *  *

O
CHS DID NOT COME
gently. He entered the monitor room loudly, eyes bulging with gangster aggression. His skull was mottled red with his indignation. “What is this all about?” he demanded.

“That’s what I want to know,” said Miranda.

“Take it up with Cavendish, whatever it is.” He made a show of trying to leave, but the Captain had sent two of his biggest men. They loomed at the door.

“Sit,” said the Captain.

Then Ochs caught sight of the television screen by Miranda’s elbow. The stranger was sitting on a metal bed in a stainless steel cell. A small noise eked from Ochs’s nostrils. The red blotches on his polished head drained pale. “Swift,” he whispered. “But he’s dead.”

Miranda felt a shock of happiness, wicked and relieved at the same time. Ochs was afraid. And the stranger had been honest at least about his name. “We were discussing you,” she said.