The Strain

at Ground Zero, first as part of the rescue mission, and then the recovery effort. The specter of 9/11 still hung over many of these Port Authority officers, and the current bewildering mass-casualty situation had brought it crashing down again.

A “go team” of analysts and investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, D.C., arrived aboard an FAA Gulfstream. They were there to interview all involved with the “incident” aboard Regis Air Flight 753, to document the aircraft’s final moments of navigability, and to retrieve the flight-data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. Investigators from the New York City Department of Health, having been leapfrogged by the CDC in the crisis response, were briefed on the matter, though Eph rejected their jurisdiction claim. He knew he had to keep control of the containment response if he wanted it done right.

Boeing representatives en route from Washington State had already disclaimed the 777’s complete shutdown as “mechanically impossible.” A Regis Air vice president, roused from his bed in Scarsdale, was insisting that a team of Regis’s own mechanics be the first to board the aircraft for inspection, once the medical quarantine was lifted. (Corruption of the air-circulation system was the current prevailing cause-of-death theory.) The German ambassador to the United States and his staff were still awaiting their diplomat’s pouch, Eph leaving them cooling their heels in Lufthansa’s Senator Lounge inside terminal 1. The mayor’s press secretary made plans for an afternoon news conference, and the police commissioner arrived with the head of his counterterrorism bureau inside the rolling headquarters of the NYPD’s critical response vehicle.

By midmorning, all but eighty corpses had been unloaded. The identification process was proceeding speedily, thanks to passport scans and the detailed passenger manifest.

During a suit break, Eph and Nora conferred with Jim outside the containment zone, the bulk of the aircraft fuselage visible over the curtain screens. Airplanes were taking off and landing again outside; they could hear the thrusters gaining and decelerating overhead, and feel the stir in the atmosphere, the agitation of air.

Eph asked Jim, between gulps of bottled water, “How many bodies can the M.E. in Manhattan handle?”

Jim said, “Queens has jurisdiction here, but you’re right, the Manhattan headquarters is the best equipped. Logistically, we’re going to be spreading the victims out among those two and Brooklyn and the Bronx. So, about fifty each.”

“How are we going to transport them?”

“Refrigerated trucks. Medical examiner said that’s how they did the World Trade Center remains. Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan, they’ve been contacted.”

Eph often thought of disease control as a wartime resistance effort, he and his team fighting the good fight while the rest of the world tried to get on with their daily lives under the cloud of occupation, the viruses and bacteria that plagued them. In this scenario, Jim was the underground radio broadcaster, conversant in three languages, who could procure anything from butter to arms to safe passage out of Marseilles.

Eph said, “Nothing from Germany?”

“Not yet. They shut down the airport for two hours, a full security check. No employees sick at the airport, no sudden illnesses being reported to hospitals.”

Nora was anxious to speak. “Nothing here adds up.”

Eph nodded in agreement. “Go ahead.”

“We have a plane full of corpses. Were this caused by a gas, or some aerosol in the ventilation system— accidental or not—they would not have all gone so… I have to say, so peacefully. There would have been choking, flailing. Vomiting. Turning blue. People with different body types going down at different times. And attendant panic. Now—if instead this was an infectious event, then we have some kind of crazy-sudden, totally new emerging pathogen, something none of us have ever seen. Indicating something man-made, created in a lab. And at the same time, remember, it’s not just the passengers who died—the plane itself died too. Almost as though some thing, some incapacitating thing, hit the airplane itself, and wiped out everything inside it, including the passengers. But that’s not exactly accurate, is it? Because, and I think this is the most important question of all right now, who opened the door?” She looked back and forth between Eph and Jim. “I mean—it could have been the pressure change. Maybe the door had already been unlocked, and the aircraft’s decompression forced it open. We can come up with cute explanations for just about anything, because we’re medical scientists, that’s what we do.”

“And those window shades,” said Jim. “People always look out the windows during landing. Who closed them all?”

Eph nodded. He had been so focused on the details all morning, it was good to step back and see strange events from a distance. “This is why the four survivors are going to be key. If they witnessed anything.”

Nora said, “Or were otherwise involved.”

Jim said, “All four are in critical but stable condition in the isolation wing at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. Captain Redfern, the third pilot, male, thirty-two. A lawyer from Westchester County, female, forty-one. A computer programmer from Brooklyn, male, forty-four. And a musician, a celebrity from Manhattan and Miami Beach, male, thirty-six. His name is Dwight Moorshein.”

Eph shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

“He performs under the name Gabriel Bolivar.”

Eph said, “Oh.”

Nora said, “Ew.”

Jim said, “He was traveling incognito in first class. No fright makeup, no crazy contact lenses. So there will be even more media heat.”

Eph said, “Any connection between the survivors?”

“None we see yet. Maybe their med workup will find something. They were scattered throughout the plane, the programmer was flying coach, the lawyer in business, the singer first class. And Captain Redfern, of course, up in the flight deck.”

“Baffling,” said Eph. “But it’s something anyway. If they regain consciousness, that is. Long enough for us to get some answers out of them.”

One of the Port Authority officers came around for Eph. “Dr. Goodweather, you better get back in there,” he said. “The cargo hold. They found something.”

Through the side cargo hatch, inside the underbelly of the 777, they had already begun off-loading the rolling steel luggage cabinets, to be opened and inspected by the Port Authority HAZMAT team. Eph and Nora sidestepped the remaining train-linked containers, wheels locked into floor tracks.

At the far end of the hold lay a long, rectangular box, black, wooden, and heavy looking, like a grand cabinet laid out on its back. Unvarnished ebony, eight or so feet long by four feet wide by three high. Taller than a refrigerator. The top side was edged all around with intricate carving, labyrinthine flourishes accompanied by lettering in an ancient or perhaps made-to-look-ancient language. Many of the swirls resembled figures, flowing human figures—and perhaps, with a little imagination, faces screaming.

“No one’s opened it yet?” asked Eph.

The HAZMAT officers all shook their heads. “We haven’t touched the thing,” one said.

Eph checked the back of it. Three orange restraining straps, their steel hooks still in the floor eyelets, lay on the floor next to the cabinet. “These straps?”

“Undone when we came in,” said another.

Eph looked around the hold. “That’s impossible,” he said. “If this thing was left unrestrained during transit, it would have done major damage to the luggage containers, if not the interior walls of the cargo hold itself.” He looked it over again. “Where’s its tag? What does the cargo manifest say?”

One of the officers had a sheaf of laminated pages in his gloved hand, bound by a single ring clasp. “It’s not here.”

Eph went over to see for himself. “That can’t be.”

“The only irregular cargo listed here, other than three sets of golf clubs, is a kayak.” The guy pointed to the side wall where, bound by the same type of orange ratchet straps, a plastic-wrapped kayak lay plastered with airline luggage stickers.

“Call Berlin,” said Eph. “They must have a record. Somebody there remembers this thing. It must weigh four