Year Zero (25 page)

“What in God’s name is he doing here?”

“He brought the Smithsonian specimens that you said don’t exist,” she said. “I wanted to hear your side of it.”

“My side of what?” said Ochs. The blood returned to his face. But his bluster was gone. “He’s a convicted murderer. A cannibal. Yes, it’s true, in this day and age. It all came out in his trial. He tried to kill me. They jailed him in Kathmandu. You must have read about it.”

The seamy, tabloid details rushed to her. This was that man? But she recalled, even before the plague transcended it, doubting the story could be true in all its parts. It had seemed too sordid, too fantastic to be real.

“He’s hunting me,” said Ochs. “He wants revenge.”

“That’s not what he told us,” she managed to say. Ochs’s fear was so…delicious.

The precision-trimmed goatee twitched. “What did he tell you? Jerusalem, is that it?”

“Tell me,” said Miranda.
Jerusalem?
This was like feeding quarters into a video game. Ochs was practically playing himself.

“He was one of my students. An idiot, really. Every department has one, the lost soul scraping for identity. I stuck him out in the desert where he couldn’t embarrass himself.”

“Jerusalem,” she repeated.

“He heard about the Golgotha find. He called me. The earthquake had just hit. A quick buck, he said.”

“You robbed the Golgotha site?” Until this moment, she’d never known it had been robbed.

“What could I do? I went to stop him. He was married to my sister. I wasn’t trying to protect him, only my family. My department.”

“That’s not what he said.” She didn’t know what else to say. Feed the quarters in.

“I didn’t push him. He fell,” Ochs snarled. “I was trying to catch him.”

Was he talking about Jerusalem? The Captain knew more about it than she did. “You left him,” he said. “In the mountains.”

Ochs came closer to the screen. Nathan Lee could have been waiting for a bus to arrive. “How did he get out?” he muttered to himself. “He’s here?”

“He says he wants his daughter,” said the Captain.

“She’s not here.”

“Where is she?”

Miranda was grateful for the Captain’s presence. He was driving to the heart of the matter. They had found the saddlebags in the tree. Their part of the bargain was to provide the man his daughter, or clues. But Ochs was too clever, or frightened.

“He’s dead,” said Ochs. “Tell him that. We told her he died.”

“Tell him yourself,” said the Captain. It was all the leverage he had, a bully threat.

“I’m not going in there.”

And that was the end of it. They couldn’t force Ochs to speak. And Miranda didn’t have the nerve to throw Ochs into the same cell with his enemy. Slowly Ochs emerged from his confusion. He began to comprehend their deception.

“Is that it?” he said. “That’s all you had?” He bent and smeared his thumb across Nathan Lee’s image on the screen.

“I’m keeping him,” Miranda suddenly spoke.

The Captain looked at her. Ochs was contemptuous. “It will never work,” he said. “The council will throw him to the dogs.” The council was Cavendish.

“Essential personnel.” She made it up as she went along. “The Year Zero remains. Golgotha. Forensics.”

It came to her. She could draw the line. Maybe she couldn’t take back all the territory Cavendish had seized over the years. But she could fortify the safe haven she had begun to build here. It needed a guardian, someone who struck fear into her enemies, or at least into this one bully. It was a start. With Nathan Lee Swift in her keeping, Ochs would think twice before descending upon them. No more raids, she thought. No more terror tactics. She would force it with her father, if it came to that. Cavendish, be damned.

“I’m very clear about this,” she told Ochs.

“We’ll see about that,” he said.

Miranda did something she’d never done to anyone. She slapped him. It wasn’t much of a slap, but Ochs looked shot. He blinked. He comprehended.

“Yes,” she told him.

T
HE
L
AST
D
AYS OF
J
ULY

I
’m not a child,” Miranda warned him. “I know what you want. Don’t get any ideas.” They had emerged from Alpha Lab’s maze of basements. It was a New Mexican morning, blue sky, yellow sun. She was strange to him. Her loping stride made Nathan Lee feel tardy. He hurried to keep up.

The hillside was crowded with buildings, trailers, even a big red-and-white circus tent with a fading Barnum and Bailey on one side. A painted sign in front of the tent read C
ENTER FOR
N
ONLINEAR
S
TUDIES
. Another sign declared E
QUATION OF
S
TATE
.
Where on earth am I?
he thought.

She reminded him of a rancher’s bride in some old B-movie, tall and lean in a man’s Levis and a checkered red shirt. Her ponytail hung through the hole at the back of her baseball cap. It said
Jackson Lab, Of Mice and Men.
Her eyes unsettled him. They were green as sea ice.

Electric golf carts darted past them. Campus types—amazons in jog bras, bearded whiz kids, wide-bottomed brainiacs—flashed by on battery-propelled scooters or on roller blades or bicycles. They passed buildings with exotic names: P
LASMA
T
HEORY
, H
OST
P
ATHOGEN
, P
RIONS
, L
IVER
F
UNCTION
. He pointed at a building: T
HEORETICAL
B
IOLOGY
. “Your dragons and sea monsters?” he said.

She blinked. She got it. Humor. Onward.
Wrong address,
he thought to himself.

“You want Ochs,” she continued. “Forget him. He’s part of the regime. You need to know that. You’re safe for now. I can clear you for T/A3, my technical area, that’s it. You’ll be provided food and lodging. But South Sector’s off-limits. Go there, and you’ll never come back.”

South Sector.
He filed it away. Ochs’s home.

She stayed a full step ahead of him. He couldn’t seem to catch up. Biohazard symbols were posted everywhere, so prevalent they had become part of the landscape. Local artists had customized the menacing three-pronged “flower” into beautiful arabesques and harmless graffiti. The warnings had become decoration, the perils had become part of their lifestyle.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Lunch. You look like a poster boy for yoga.”

“I’m going to need to talk with him,” he said.

“That’s what I’m saying,” she said. “Don’t.”

“Then I might as well leave.” He was testing the limits. Hers, his, he couldn’t say.

“You could,” she said. “Or you could give it a little time.” Her ponytail chased her shoulders.

“There’s not much time out there.”

She stopped. He sidestepped the collision. She threw her hand towards a squat building. “Nirvana. One of our supercomputers. In the old days it stored an HIV database. Now we run code on it with Corfu data. If I had my way, we’d still have the Blue Mountain. But Cavendish took it with him into South Sector. I tried to stop him. It’s four times more powerful. Do you understand what I’m saying? There’s a limit to my power.”

They crossed a bridge named Omega, which spanned a small canyon. Ahead lay the city, no great beauty, but bustling and alive. A white van pulled alongside them. It had black tinted windows, and Nathan Lee saw his own reflection. Miranda didn’t waste a glance on it. After ten seconds, the van drove on.

“Los Alamos used to be a very safe town,” she commented. “Then it grew up.”

Partway across the bridge, the snow began falling. The flakes fell out of a blue sky, and Nathan Lee stopped to let them gather on his palms. The flakes were white and warm. He looked around, and no one seemed to notice.

Miranda came back to him. “Ashes,” she said. Her baseball cap and shoulders were sprinkled with it.

Nathan Lee pinched the ash between his fingers. He smelled the breeze. “A forest fire?” he said.

“Burn day,” she told him.

“Garbage?”

“Medical refuse,” she said. “Intellectual debris. Don’t worry. It can’t hurt you. The incinerators burn hot. Two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, something like that.”

She turned and went on. He brushed his hands clean, and continued the chase.

They entered a large cafeteria perched on the edge of the canyon. The view was five-star; the ambience was pure junior high school. There were boisterous cliques and bookworms jabbing the open page and partners bent over their homework. He saw plates with meatloaf and pan pizza and squares of red jello. There was even a soda machine with Pepsi or Coke, regular or diet. You could forget the rest of the world in here. Maybe that was the idea.

Suddenly he was famished. He didn’t belong here, but all of a sudden he was hungry for this place. The room bulged with sunlight. The chrome surfaces sparkled. The people were at peace.

Even standing still at the end of the line, Miranda was a whirlwind. Everyone seemed to know her. People approached with requests and small emergencies. Her cell phone rang. She gave her attention in short, laser bursts. He tried to guess her age under the cap brim. Late twenties, early thirties? She was necessary to them all somehow. And now she was necessary to him. He was baffled.

She handed him a tray and plowed into the buffet. They took a table away from the noise. Her fingers were polished bright orange from laboratory chemicals. Her cheeseburger disappeared in five bites.

Nathan Lee ate sparingly. His hands trembled. Peas spilled from his fork.

“The clinic can treat your malaria,” she said.

“I’ve got malaria?”

“We’re careful up here. The blood test screens for everything.” The green eyes studied him. “Which jungle did you pick that up in?”

He gave up on the peas. “It started in Kansas. I wondered about that.”

“Kansas?” She thought. “Malaria? Can you remember, did the mosquitos have a tilted resting position? Classic
Anopheles.”

“I just slapped the little bastards.”

“Bitches, actually,” she corrected him. “The disease barriers are crashing.” Her eyes drifted away from him.

He noticed, on the wall behind her, a large computerized display of the planet. Red signified plague zones, and blue the untouched land regions. Great ragged holes maimed the South and Northeast. The Pacific Coast states were a single bright red arc. Washington, D.C., was no more. The plague had been so close at his heels?

“I had the map put in here to keep people focused,” she said. “But it only ruined their appetites.”

“I guess so.” Somewhere in that creeping mass of color was his daughter.

“That was for about ten minutes. Then they got over it. Now no one looks up there anymore, except for the office pools. They bet on where the virus will peak next. It’s my fault. I jaded them.”

“How much time is left?” he asked.

“That’s the hundred-dollar question. New strains keep jumping up. It’s difficult.”

“Difficult?” He pulled his attention from the map. Sweat beaded his forehead. He wiped it with a paper napkin. They had everything here. And the best they could come up with was “difficult.” Not that he cared. He had his own needs, starting with Ochs…and a sharp knife. He had the knife now, a steak knife, up his sleeve. That was a start.

“Do you know who we are?” she demanded.

It sounded like a trick question. “The good guys,” he said.

“The greatest concentration of genius in history,” she declared. “Forget the Manhattan Project. Forget the race for the moon. Forget the cancer wars. There’s never been so much intelligence gathered in one place focused on one goal as right here, right now.”

After all the poverty and mean highways, this place did seem different. They were clean and unguarded. Laughter echoed in the sunbeams. For the first time in memory, he didn’t smell rank sweat or fear. Probably not one carried a weapon. They didn’t hunch defensively over their plates. No one wolfed their food…except for this living hurricane across the table. It came to him. They were gods and goddesses in Patagonia shorts, Bolle sunglasses, and, here and there, the inevitable argyle socks. Their eyes were the greatest proof. They were free. Free of looking over their shoulders, of scouring the ground, of measuring their neighbor. They had faraway eyes.

“And I’m losing them,” Miranda stated. “Experiments start, but never finish,” she said. “Labs are mired. Morale is plunging. The research proposals get more bizarre by the day. We’re not scientists anymore, just alchemists. There’s no peer review, no time for tiered testing, no publishing. I have no idea what most of these people are doing anymore. Chasing after white rabbits.”

Worry lines sprang across her forehead, and for a minute she looked very old. But her face could not hold the age. Suddenly he saw through the circles under her eyes and the bowed shoulders. This woman—this mother to a people—was barely more than a teenager. It jarred him.

“We’re falling behind,” she said. “Giving up. I’ve tried everything I know. I even brought in a group of medicine men to purify us. Navajo and Zuni shamen. Nothing works.” She rapped her knuckles on the table.

“People pray for you,” he said.

“What?” She seemed to come awake.

“On my way across America, at their meals, when they say grace, when it’s time to put the kids to bed, they add a little blessing for Los Alamos.”

She frowned. “They shouldn’t do that.”

“It sounds like you can use some extra help.”

“How about you. Do you pray for us?”

“No.”

“Me either,” she said. “We have enough voodoo up here.”

“They’re with you, that’s what I meant.”

His eyes flickered to the doomsday map. Tendrils of plague dangled from Chicago, a crimson man o’war.

“Keep working at that,” she said, pointing at his hamburger. “I have a meeting. I’ll have someone in the office get you settled. Take the afternoon off.”

“I want to thank you,” he started.

“I know,” she said. “You’re much obliged. You owe me a life. Don’t worry, you’ll work it off.”

“You have work for me?”

“I’m going to have to justify you somehow,” she said. “Is it true you were an anthropologist?”

“That was the plan.”

“You looted the Golgotha site?”

Ochs, he thought. No sense fudging it. “Bones. Bits of wood. Metal splinters.”

“And you were a prisoner?” She had him cold.

“Yes.”

“Perfect,” she said, and left.

T
HEY ISSUED HIM
a tiny apartment in the city and gave him a clearance badge for Alpha Lab. Everything else was free to any citizen: food, clothing, a bicycle. His first evening he stood by the window for hours, bewitched, and shy. It was a city of light.

This was Georgia O’Keeffe country. The sunset was fire. On the rooftops of surrounding apartment buildings, families and friends gathered to barbecue, drink microbrews, and watch the close of day. In the far distance, the Sangre de Christo mountains lived up to their name, running bloody with light.

Darkness never truly descended. Los Alamos had patched together its own nuclear power plant with spare parts and surplus plutonium. The city was brighter than an amusement park. The streets were brilliant. Music played on stereos. He left his window open, and the mountain air was cool. Across the way, a young couple danced. It was lovely. At last he drew the curtains and went to sleep.

Miranda woke him at three in the morning. He thought it was a dream. He hadn’t heard a telephone ring in three years. “They found your saddlebags right where you said,” she said. “We’ve had a look. Most of the specimens were worthless. Two or three might have some promise. I thought you might want to see.”

“Tomorrow?” he said.

“Today is tomorrow,” she said.

“You mean right now?”

“Aren’t you curious to see what you begat?”

S
HE GAVE HIM
a running tour of Alpha Lab’s buried parts. It was, he comprehended, less an introduction to the building and work, than to an idea. They paused at one window, and his saddlebags were in one corner, with the contents of the Smithsonian packet spread out on a work table, cut to pieces, and neatly tagged. They entered a hallway lined with freezers. “Our database.” She opened a big freezer door. Frost poured out like smoke. The thermometer read minus-70 degrees. She took the lid off a Styrofoam packet numbered with magic marker, and hundreds of thin vials of yellow fluid stood nested in holes.

She ran her fingers along the freezers. “Jerusalem,” she said. “Four hundred and twenty-three souls from the first century. Or at least their DNA. Which is the same thing, in a way.”

“These come from the bones?”

“Bones, teeth, hard tissue. Dried blood chips from wood and metal fragments.”

“That’s not possible,” he said. He wasn’t completely unfamiliar with genetic archaeology. “You can only extract DNA from soft tissue. It has to be preserved.”

“You’ve been out of the loop a few years.” She patted his arm condescendingly.