drove me nuts debating him—he had the academic cred, the name, the CV, and who the hell was I? I looked like your office’s IT guy standing next to that stately, handsome man, twiggy in his tweeds, with his pipe-smoky baritone, his Boston Brahmin accent, and that obnoxious tic of swiping back his silver hair. Twit.
I rubbed circles on my throbbing temples with my thumbs, my gathering headache coming at me in fuzzy radio waves of pain, and was more astonished than alarmed when a guy I didn’t know came in and sat down across from me. He looked like an ex-husband of Britney Spears: skinny arms blue with bad tats, houndstooth Sinatra hat, a goatee that looked drawn on.
A small part of me wondered if I was still asleep.
“Can I help you?” I said.
“You Jackson Oz?”
I might have rolled my eyes. Here we go.
So, then. I’d written a book about HAC, which had become a controversial bestseller. On the one hand, it was the best thing I’d done yet to spread the word about HAC: it led to appearances on the major media outlets, where I tried to warn people about the growing danger and the increasingly dire need for immediate, coordinated action. On the other hand, I was sort of famous—or, rather, infamous. Pet owners didn’t like me much. “Dog people,” especially, despised my message, now even more so since we’d gotten Congress and the president to consider a national quarantine.
“Actually, no,” I said. “But I get that all the time.”
The man was unfazed.
“Why you gotta hate on dogs, yo? Why you gotta be getting people all crazy and shit? To sell your stupid-ass books? My rottie ain’t evil. She’s a sweetheart.”
“Everything okay here?” said a behemoth of a black man in a tailored pin-striped suit who had just materialized in the doorway beside K-Fed.
“We havin’ a conver
“Not anymore,” said my sometime bodyguard, FBI special agent Nimo Kade. He flashed a winning smile and a badge. “Would you like to find your seat or do you need some help?”
Nimo shouldered the dipshit out of the train car and I let out a long breath of relief.
Working with the government has its perks.
This sort of thing happened a lot. My e-mail in-box was so full of death threats that these days I just deleted them without being curious enough to open them.
“You bring out the best and brightest, don’t you, Oz?” Nimo said when the guy was gone.
“It’s my sparkling personality,” I said. “Where is everyone?”
Chloe appeared in the doorway of the train car. The best thing about the last five years—five unrewarding years of slaving away in the lab, constant traveling, constant frustration—was having Chloe by my side. She’d been working as hard as I was. Harder, actually. And somehow, instead of sporting my burned-fuse chic, she was her same self, with silky skin and owlish eyes, her body willowy and elegant as a stroke of calligraphy.
Then there was a noisy, porcine squeal, and something giggly and sticky shot through the open doorway, scrambled onto the seat, and landed in my lap.
“Egads! A monster!” I said in my 1930s radio drama voice as our three-year-old son, Eli, climbed me as though he were Sir Edmund Hillary and I were Everest. I put him in a mock headlock and kissed him on the top of his fuzzy blond head.
Eli wasn’t only a rambunctious kid who loved wrestling and snapping together LEGO guns, he was smart. As a whip. At eighteen months, he could write words on the fridge with magnet letters. And he was bilingual in English and French.
Chloe and I had gotten married in a quickie job in the city clerk’s office the day after she found out she was pregnant. Then we’d held a ceremony for friends and family a couple of months later. Eli was born eight weeks prematurely, and had to be put in the NICU. We were afraid he might not make it. But a week later, he bounced back. Started getting bigger and healthier.
As I watched him hop up next to Chloe in the seat across from me and open his favorite book,
The hell with Yeats, I thought. The center would hold. It would have to. For my wife and son, I’d make it hold or die trying.
Chapter 52
TRAFFIC WAS STOPPED dead on the way to the Capitol from Union Station. In the backseat of the sleek black government sedan, Eli fidgeted in my lap, gnawing like a gremlin on a fruit leather we had gotten at Trader Joe’s. He was getting cranky. Chloe was already cranky because they didn’t have the car seat for Eli that they had said they would. The afternoon sun sparkled on a sea of chrome and glass and glowered like a fat yellow bully above us, a problem that the car’s anemic AC alleviated exactly not at all.
I was getting pretty cranky myself. Another worthless hearing? What was the use? Nothing ever happened at these kangaroo courts but a jamboree of choreographed histrionics. Worst of all, Senator Charlie Chargaff, my avowed archenemy, was going to be on the inquiry panel today. I couldn’t wait to get grilled by a hair-plugged good ol’ boy with a spray-on tan who was going to try to ride his demonization of me into the White House.
When at long last we rounded a corner, I could see the reason for the clogged traffic. A block from the Capitol complex, a smattering of young people in black hoodies and black masks were squaring off against riot cops. Several of the protesters were waving black flags with the circle-A anarchy symbol sprayed on them in cracked white paint. Billowing plumes of pink smoke sprayed up around them. Car horns honked all around us like the bleating of bored sheep.
“What are these fools protesting now?” Chloe said, watching from the corner of her eye as Eli whacked a Batman action figure against the seat, making blow-up noises with his cheeks. “They already have what they want. Anarchy is here.”
The driver peeled off into a U-turn and brought us around the back of the Capitol building. I felt the tickling buzz of my phone vibrating in the inner lining of my suit jacket.
The caller ID said US GOVERNMENT.
“Who is it?” Chloe said.
“Uncle Sam,” I said.
“Mr. Oz?” said a resonant voice.
“Speaking.”
“Are you at the hearing yet?”
“Bad traffic, on my way. Who is this?”
“This is Stanley Marshall, the president’s chief of staff. Something’s come up, a matter of national security. We need your help on it. Take a detour and come for a meeting.”
“Now? I’m scheduled to speak in half an hour.”
“I understand that, Mr. Oz. The president would like to speak to you instead. This is more pressing. Put one of the agents on the phone; I can give him directions.”
I lurched into the front seat and handed Nimo my phone.
“What was that?” Chloe said as we pulled another U-turn. Eli dropped his Batman figure on the car floor as we turned.
“Mommy! Get Ba’man!”
“I don’t know,” I half whispered. “I guess we’re going to meet the president.”
Ten minutes later the car was pulling into a municipal parking garage in Dupont Circle. Seemed fishy. I leaned up front.
“Are we meeting Deep Throat?” I said. “I thought we were going to the White House.”
Nimo looked back at me and shrugged.
