tomorrow—hopefully tomorrow… but if there’s
Zack nodded, his eyes still distant.
Matt called down from the top step. “Come on in, Zack. Let’s see if we can get that thing hooked up.”
Dependable, reliable Matt. Kelly sure had him trained well. Eph watched his son go inside under Matt’s arm, Zack glancing back one last time at Eph.
Alone now, he and Kelly stood facing each other on the little patch of grass. Behind her, over the roof of her house, the lights of the waiting airplanes circled. An entire network of transportation, never mind various government and law enforcement agencies, was waiting for this man facing a woman who said she didn’t love him anymore.
“It’s that airplane, isn’t it.”
Eph nodded. “They’re all dead. Everybody on board.”
“All dead?” Kelly’s eyes flared with concern. “How? What could it be?”
“That’s what I have to go find out.”
Eph felt the urgency of his job settling over him now. He had blown it with Zack—but that was done, and now he had to go. He reached into his pocket and handed her an envelope with the pin-striped logo. “For tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “In case I don’t make it back before then.”
Kelly peeked at the tickets, her eyebrows lifting at the price, then tucked them back inside the envelope. She looked at him with an expression approaching sympathy. “Just be sure not to forget our meeting with Dr. Kempner.”
The family therapist—the one who would decide Zack’s final custody. “Kempner, right,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
“And—be careful,” she said.
Eph nodded and started away.
JFK International Airport
A CROWD HAD GATHERED outside the airport, people drawn to the unexplained, the weird, the potentially tragic, the
Inside the terminal, two airport carts passed Eph, one carrying a teary mother holding the hands of two frightened-looking children, another with an older black gentleman riding with a bouquet of red roses across his lap. He realized that somebody else’s Zack was out there on that plane. Somebody else’s Kelly. He focused on that.
Eph’s team was waiting for him outside a locked door just below gate 6. Jim Kent was working the phone, as usual, speaking into the wire microphone dangling from his ear. Jim handled the bureaucratic and political side of disease control for Eph. He closed his hand around the mic part of his phone wire and said, by way of greeting, “No other reports of planes down anywhere else in the country.”
Eph climbed in next to Nora Martinez in the back of the airline cart. Nora, a biochemist by training, was his number two in New York. Her hands were already gloved, the nylon barrier as pale and smooth and mournful as lilies. She shifted over a little for him as he sat down. He regretted the awkwardness between them.
They started to move, Eph smelling marsh salt in the wind. “How long was the plane on the ground before it went dark?”
Nora said, “Six minutes.”
“No radio contact? Pilot’s out too?”
Jim turned and said, “Presumed, but unconfirmed. Port Authority cops went into the passenger compartment, found it full of corpses, and got right out again.”
“They were masked and gloved, I hope.”
“Affirmative.”
The cart turned a corner, revealing the airplane waiting in the distance. A massive aircraft, work lights trained on it from multiple angles, shining as bright as day. Mist off the nearby bay created a glowing aura around the fuselage.
“Christ,” said Eph.
Jim said, “A ‘triple seven,’ they call it. The 777, the world’s largest twin jet. Recent design, new aircraft. Why they’re flipped out about the equipment going down. They think it’s something more like sabotage.”
The landing-gear tires alone were enormous. Eph looked up at the black hole that was the open door over the broad left wing.
Jim said, “They already tested for gas. They tested for everything man-made. They don’t know what else to do but start from scratch.”
Eph said, “Us being the scratch.”
This dormant aircraft mysteriously full of dead people was the HAZMAT equivalent of waking up one day and finding a lump on your back. Eph’s team was the biopsy lab charged with telling the Federal Aviation Administration whether or not it had cancer.
Blue-blazer-wearing TSA officials pounced on Eph as soon as the cart stopped, trying to give him the same briefing Jim had just had. Asking him questions and talking over each other like reporters.
“This has gone on too long,” said Eph. “Next time something unexplained like this happens, you call us second. HAZMAT first, us second. Got it?”
“Yes, sir, Dr. Goodweather.”
“Is HAZMAT ready?”
“Standing by.”
Eph slowed before the CDC van. “I will say that this doesn’t read like a spontaneous contagious event. Six minutes on the ground? The time element is too short.”
“It has to be a deliberate act,” said one of the TSA officials.
“Perhaps,” said Eph. “As it stands now, in terms of whatever might be awaiting us in there—we have containment.” He opened the rear door of the van for Nora. “We’ll suit up and see what we’ve got.”
A voice stopped him. “We have one of our own on this plane.”
Eph turned back. “One of whose?”
“A federal air marshal. Standard on international flights involving U.S. carriers.”
“Armed?” Eph said.
“That’s the general idea.”
“No phone call, no warning from him?”
“No nothing.”
“It must have overpowered them immediately.” Eph nodded, looking into these men’s worried faces. “Get me his seat assignment. We’ll start there.”
Eph and Nora ducked inside the CDC van, closing the rear double doors, shutting out the anxiety of the tarmac behind them.
They pulled Level A HAZMAT gear down off the rack. Eph stripped down to his T-shirt and shorts, Nora to a black sports bra and lavender panties, each accommodating the other’s elbows and knees inside the cramped Chevy van. Nora’s hair was thick and dark and defiantly long for a field epidemiologist, and she swept it up into a tight elastic, arms working purposefully and fast. Her body was gracefully curved, her flesh the warm tone of lightly browned toast.
After Eph’s separation from Kelly became permanent and she initiated divorce proceedings, Eph and Nora had a brief fling. It was just one night, followed by a very awkward and uncomfortable morning after, which dragged on for months and months… right up until their second fling, just a few weeks ago—which, while even more passionate than the first, and full of intention to avoid the pitfalls that had overwhelmed them the first time, had led again to another protracted and awkward detente.
