Elena sat at a desk with a wide screen and kept talking, not pausing for introductions. “We have a list of sites for you. I’m afraid we haven’t figured out the best route.”
Berenike raised her phone and aimed its camera. “I can do that. Let me grab the data. I can read it right off your screen. I have software from AutoKar, and we have to do this sometimes for clients. Is there a schedule or appointments?” She had the software, she recalled bitterly, because AutoKar had required her to use her personal phone for work but had never given her a dime for its purchase price or monthly fees.
“We need everything as soon as possible. That’s all. The plan isn’t quite that detailed.”
“That’s fine. That’s what I need to know.” She entered a few more parameters, trying to copy Elena’s calm, controlled, unvindictive urgency.
The officer stood up. “I’m Neal Sacks. I’ll be riding shotgun with you, just in case.” He didn’t extend his hand—no handshakes. Everyone knew the drill.
“Neal…” Now she knew. “Weren’t we in grade school together? Vieau School? I wasn’t there long, but I remember you. You were in school plays, a grade ahead of me. I’m Berenike Woulfe.”
“Yeah, I wanted to be an actor so bad.” His eyes narrowed for a moment. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember you from back then.”
“I was just another little kid.” He had been suave and debonair, two words she had learned solely to describe him for herself. She had tried to be just like him, and she knew at the end of just one year that she would never succeed. “I worked for AutoKar.” That wouldn’t impress him. “I commandeered a nice truck for us to use.”
His eyes narrowed with a smile. “Commandeered. That’s the Vieau spirit: We achieve.” He hadn’t changed much from the boy in her memory.
Her phone dinged: route calculated. She showed it to Elena. “It suggests three loops, starting on the North Side.”
Elena approved. Neal picked up a rifle and a helmet.
“Oh,” he said. “You should wear this.” He handed Berenike a bulletproof police vest. She put it on without comment, trying to maintain her new attitude as they walked out. He carried a spare helmet for her. Would that really be necessary? She didn’t want to ask.
In the truck, he pulled up a map on his screen with three dozen red dots. “We need to avoid these locations, but they change, so we’ll need to keep making adjustments.”
She turned on the truck’s interface, entered the route, and began setting overrides. “What are those dots?”
“Different things.” He buckled himself in, put on his helmet, and lowered the visor. “Reports of gunfire, mostly. And not where you’d think. Maybe countermutiny. We gotta watch out for that. A couple of house fires. There’s a bad traffic accident on Highway 100.”
She looked at the near-empty streets around them. “An accident? How did that happen?” The truck began to move. She took the helmet and put it on.
“Someone plowed into cars at an intersection. We think maybe the driver was driving manually and had a seizure. This stuff just hits some people like that.”
“Yeah, it can.” Like Papa. “So, we’re going to get on the freeway, and they’re almost empty, and I’m going to tell the truck to drive as fast as possible.”
“Our cruisers can do that. It’s a fun ride.”
The trip to the freeway was short, and soon they were speeding at more than one hundred miles per hour on straightaways. She leaned back and tried to ignore how the country was speeding faster than she wanted to calculate into what would likely be its biggest disaster in history. A possible disaster for her, too.
Neal consulted his screen. “Now, you should know for some of these pickups, we’re commandeering goods. The owners might get touchy. That’s why I’m here.”
Confucius spoke of superior and inferior men, of those who were motivated by upright morals contrasted with those who were interested in themselves rather than the greater good. If inferior men governed a kingdom, they would bring it to disorder and a lack of virtue, and they would lose the mandate of heaven to continue their rule. Had that moment come? I hoped so, although inferior men (or people of any gender, of course) could have superior firepower and be willing to abuse it. To those living in a misgoverned kingdom, Confucius urged resistance, and one form of opposition, he said, involved a dedication to truth.
I had time for that twenty-second meditation (some philosophical conflicts have straightforward solutions) as I followed my soldier to speak to Colonel Wilkinson in his office. I had seen three things, one of them capable of damning an inferior man if I could speak the truth at the right moment.
“I’ve found something astonishing,” I told him. “You need to see how people react to it.”
Without a word, he rose. He already knew most of what I did, but I might be able to answer the key question for him: Exactly who had abused their power?
Vita and Tavis were waiting in the conference room with its metal folding chairs. Others came like moths drawn to the flame of my reputation. Peng had something urgent to say! They settled into place, silent except for lifesaving coughs and sniffles.
“We have three distinct viruses to consider in terms of epidemiological forensics,” I said, a statement that by itself earned a few surprised huffs. I brought up a chart on one screen in the conference room wall. “First, the original deltacoronavirus from Siberia. We have samples generously provided by China and authenticated by Korea and Japan, and they all match. This is the genuine pathogen. Here are some key segments that we’ll return to. You don’t need to understand them, although some of you do, but what you see with your bare eyes will tell you what you need to know.”
My talk felt like a sales presentation, something
