the air is constantly monitored, so people don’t have to wear their protective gear. Until you’re tested, however, you’ll have to remain in this room.”
“Tested?”
“We have a preliminary antigen test that screens for exposure. Takes about twenty minutes.”
“You need blood?”
She nodded. I stripped off my suit and rolled up my sleeve. Ellen tied a rubber band around my arm and prepared a syringe. She drew one vial of blood. Then a second.
“How’s Molly?” I said.
“What about her?”
“I was on the train with her when she got shot.”
Ellen marked both vials and left without another word. She returned a few minutes later with a stack of pages tacked to a clipboard. “I’m going to need you to fill out a couple of consent forms while I begin the run on your blood.”
I took the clipboard from her. The first page had three lines scrawled in ballpoint pen:
MOLLY’S FINE. FEDS STILL LOOKING FOR YOU. MIGHT BE WATCHING. BEHIND ME.
I glanced up at Ellen, then past her shoulder to a seam in the wall. I followed it up to the ceiling. There was a small hole there, and the pinhole lens of a camera, smiling back at me. I wrote down a single question, along with a name and phone number. Ellen took back the clipboard and nodded. The two of us talked about nothing for another five minutes. Then she left to run her tests.
I sat in the room and waited. Just me and Candid Camera. The purple notebook Marcus had given me was still in my pocket. I took it out and opened it. A blue van crouched at the bottom of one page, rear doors thrown open, red cans of gasoline stacked inside. On the next page, men with no faces and broad backs smoked and pointed at blank maps. Ray Ray stood in a long corridor of unapproachable light. Up front, I found pictures of the Korean. Smiling and pulling money from his sock. Lying dead on the narrow floor of his grocery store. Staring at a crooked clock on the wall. I flipped the notebook shut. Marcus’s name was on the cover. No address. No phone. I jammed the thing back in my pocket and wondered why he’d given it to me.
Forty-five minutes after Ellen left, the door opened again. I half expected James Doll, with a couple of Homeland goons and a pair of cuffs. Instead, it was Rachel Swenson, carrying a tight smile and a set of car keys.
CAMP CHICAGO
CHAPTER 43
They called it Camp Chicago. Much like the quarantine fences, it had sprung up literally overnight. Two square blocks cordoned off by Chicago’s finest, with Daley Plaza at its center. Ringing the camp’s perimeter was an armored shell of satellite trucks, thick hunks of cable sprouting from their cavernous bellies, a bristle of dish antennas tethered at the other end. Closer in, a skeleton of steel scaffolding ringed the plaza itself and stretched into the sky. Atop it, huge blue broadcast booths, enclosed in Plexiglas and bathed in banks of television lights.
The government had done its best to shut down the media, withholding any semblance of content from the blinking, ravenous beast. It didn’t matter. Once the fences went up, more than a thousand journalists sought credentials to cover whatever was unfolding on the West Side. Most of them knew next to nothing that wasn’t handed to them in a press release. That didn’t matter either. In fact, it only made things better.
A city terrified. A nation paralyzed. A world horrified. All of it, 24/7. Ratings went through the roof.
James Doll sat in the basement of City Hall, holed up in an airless room, watching the coverage on a bank of monitors. A parade of images streamed past. A reporter standing near the Water Tower, Michigan Avenue empty behind her. The Dan Ryan, jammed with cars going nowhere. People walking past soldiers into the Loop, belongings in shopping carts and strapped to their backs. Doll himself at a podium, mouth moving but no sound coming out. The mayor, even more so.
The man from Homeland hadn’t slept more than four hours in the last forty-eight, and the on-screen pictures held him in a sudden trance. The black phone on the table barked, and he jumped. Fuck. Doll scrubbed his face with his hands and shook his head. The phone rang again. Then a third time. Only a few people would have been routed in, and Doll wasn’t looking forward to speaking with any of them.
“Yes?” Doll listened for a moment. “Put it up on five.”
One of the monitors flickered. The news coverage was replaced by a silent feed of Michael Kelly and Rachel Swenson in a Cook County examining room. Kelly moved close and ran his hand through her hair. The woman gave what Doll imagined to be a sigh. Their bodies mingled. Kelly backed her against a wall. She spread her arms and let him in.
“Why don’t we have sound down at Cook?” Doll spoke softly into the receiver and kept his eyes glued to the screen. The couple disentangled. A moment later, they headed for the door. The feed switched to a second camera in the hallway. Doll watched them walk away. “She’s gonna drive him out? Uh-huh. Fine. Let them go.”
The door behind Doll clicked, and a man in a long gray overcoat entered the room. He dragged his left foot behind him as he walked.
“I’ll get back to you.” Doll hung up the receiver.
The gray man took a seat on the other side of the table. His eyes were dead holes, pegged into his skull and fixed on Doll.
“Call DC.”
Doll waited long enough to satisfy himself he wasn’t taking orders. Then he did exactly that. The room filled with the thunder of numbers being dialed. The other end picked up on the first ring.
“It’s me,” Doll said.
“Where are you?” The voice was muted and full of precision.
“City Hall.”
“I’m here as well,” the gray man said.
“Where’s Michael Kelly?” the voice on the phone said.
Doll’s eyes flicked to the screens. The hallway at the hospital was empty.
“He walked into Cook County Hospital about an hour and a half ago. They screened him for exposure and released him.”
“We don’t know why he was there, or what he saw?”
“I haven’t spoken to him directly,” Doll said.
“Is he still pursuing the outbreak?”
“Honestly?”
“By all means, Mr. Doll.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about Kelly.”
“You don’t have much confidence in him?”
“Guy’s a hack.”
“Really?”
“Hundred percent.”
A pause. “Anyone out there ever talk about something called the Dweller?” the voice said.
“The Dweller?”
“Kelly ever mention it?”
“No.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.” Doll scribbled down the name on a piece of paper and underlined it.
Another pause. Then the voice on the phone again.
“I think we’re going to need to take care of this.”
“Take care of what?”
“Kelly. Crane can handle it.”
