On the third morning following the landing of Flight 753, Eph took Setrakian to the office headquarters of the CDC Canary project on the western edge of Chelsea, one block east of the Hudson. Before Eph started Canary, the three-room office had been the local site for the CDC’s World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, investigating links between the 9/11 recovery effort and persistent respiratory ailments.
Eph’s heart lifted as they pulled up at Eleventh Avenue. Two police cars and a pair of unmarked sedans with government license plates were parked outside the entrance. Director Barnes had come through finally. They were going to get the help they needed. There was no way Eph, Nora, and Setrakian could fight this scourge on their own.
The third-floor office door was open when they got there, and Barnes was conferring with a plainclothes man who identified himself as an FBI special agent. “Everett,” said Eph, relieved to find him personally involved. “Your timing is perfect. Just the man I wanted to see.” He moved to a small refrigerator near the door. Test tubes clinked as he reached for a quart of whole milk, uncapping it and drinking it down fast. He needed the calcium the same way he had once needed booze. We trade off our dependencies, he realized. For instance, just last week Eph had been fully dependent upon the laws of science and nature. Now his fix was silver swords and ultraviolet light.
He brought the half-empty bottle away from his lips with the realization that he had just slaked his thirst with the product of another mammal.
“Who is this?” asked Director Barnes.
“This,” said Eph, swiping the milk mustache from his upper lip, “is Professor Abraham Setrakian.” Setrakian was holding his hat, his alabaster hair bright under the low ceiling lights. “So much has happened, Everett,” said Eph, swallowing more milk, putting out the fire in his belly. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
Barnes said, “Why don’t we start with the bodies missing from the city morgues.”
Eph lowered the bottle. One of the cops had edged closer to the door behind him. A second FBI man was sitting at Eph’s laptop, pecking away. “Hey, excuse me,” said Eph.
Barnes said, “Ephraim, what do you know about the missing corpses?”
Eph was a moment trying to read the CDC director’s face. He glanced back at Setrakian, but the old man offered him nothing, standing very still with his hat in his gnarled hands.
Eph turned back to his boss. “They have gone home.”
“Home?” said Barnes, turning his head as though trying to hear him better. “To heaven?”
“To their families, Everett.”
Barnes looked at the FBI agent who kept looking at Eph.
“They are dead,” said Barnes.
“They aren’t dead. At least, not in the way we understand it.”
“There is only one way to be dead, Ephraim.”
Eph shook his head. “Not anymore.”
“Ephraim.” Barnes took one sympathetic step forward. “I know you have been under a keen amount of stress recently. I know you have had family troubles…”
Eph said, “Hold on. I don’t think I understand what the hell this is.”
The FBI agent said, “This is about your patient, Doctor. One of the pilots of Regis Air Flight 753, Captain Doyle Redfern. We have a few questions about his care.”
Eph hid a chill. “Get a court order and I’ll answer your questions.”
“Maybe you’d like to explain this.”
He opened a portable video player on the edge of the desk and pressed play. It showed a security-camera view of a hospital room. Redfern was seen from behind, staggering, his johnny open in back. He looked wounded and confused rather than predatory and enraged. The camera angle did not show the stinger swirling out of his mouth.
It did however show Eph facing him with the whirling trephine, jabbing at Redfern’s throat with the circular blade.
There was the flicker of a jump cut, and now Nora was in the background, covering her mouth as Eph stood by the doorway with his chest heaving, Redfern in a heap on the floor.
Then another sequence began. A different camera farther along the same basement hallway, set at a higher angle. It showed two people, a man and a woman, forcing their way into the locked morgue room where Redfern’s body was being held. Then it showed them leaving with a heavy body bag.
The two people looked very much like Eph and Nora.
Playback stopped. Eph looked at Nora — who was shocked — and then at the FBI agent and Barnes. “That was…that attack was edited to look bad. There was a cut there. Redfern had—”
“Where are Captain Redfern’s remains?”
Eph couldn’t think. He couldn’t get past the lie he had just seen. “That wasn’t us. The camera was too high to—”
“So are you saying that was not you and Dr. Martinez?”
Eph looked at Nora, who was shaking her head, both of them too mystified to mount any immediate coherent defense.
Barnes said, “Let me ask you one more time, Ephraim. Where are the missing bodies from the morgues?”
Eph looked back to Setrakian, standing near the door. Then at Barnes. He couldn’t come up with anything to say.
“Ephraim, I am shutting Canary down. As of this moment.”
“What?” said Eph, coming around. “Wait, Everett—”
Eph moved fast, toward Barnes. The other cops started toward him as though he was dangerous, their reaction stopping Eph, alarming him even more.
“Dr. Goodweather, you have to come with us,” said the FBI agent. “All of you…hey!”
Eph turned. Setrakian was gone.
The agent sent two cops out to get him.
Eph looked back toward Barnes. “Everett. You know me. You know who I am. Listen to what I am about to tell you. There is a plague spreading throughout this city — a scourge unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”
The FBI agent said, “Dr. Goodweather, we want to know what you injected into Jim Kent.”
“What I…
Barnes said, “Ephraim, I have made a deal with them. They will spare Nora if you agree to cooperate. Spare her the scandal of arrest and preserve her professional reputation. I know that you two…are close.”
“And how exactly do you know that?” Eph looked around at his persecutors, moving past bewilderment and into anger. “This is bullshit, Everett.”
“You are on video attacking and murdering a patient, Ephraim. You have been reporting fantastic test results, unexplained by any rational measurement, unsubstantiated and most likely doctor-manipulated. Would I be here if I had a choice? If you had a choice?”
Eph turned to Nora. She would be spared. She could perhaps fight on.
Barnes was right. For the moment at least, in a room full of lawmen, he had no choice.
“Don’t let this slow you down,” Eph told Nora. “You may be the only one left who knows what’s really happening.”
Nora shook her head. She turned to Barnes. “Sir, there is a conspiracy here, whether you are willingly a part of it or not—”
“Please, Dr. Martinez,” said Barnes. “Don’t embarrass yourself any further.”
The other agent packed up Eph’s and Nora’s laptops. They started walking Eph down the stairs.
At the second-floor hallway, they met the two cops who had gone after Setrakian. They were standing side by side, almost back to back. Handcuffed together.
Setrakian appeared behind the group with his sword drawn. He held its point at the lead FBI agent’s neck. There was a smaller dagger in his other hand, also fashioned of silver. He held that one near Director Barnes’s throat.
