Vitals (32 page)

The segment, shot from a security camera at a high angle, showed two skinny boys and two matronly women working in the kitchen and food line. All wore aprons and plastic snoods. They worked a number of serving stations, cleaning up and replacing food.

One by one they used little plastic bottles to spray a salad bar, steam tables, and finally, racks of Jell-O cups, puddings, and other desserts Men and women filling their trays paid no attention. Just part of the routine.

Then, more segments with titles like "TAPS CIA ARL VA July 30,"

TAPSFBIACDYAug2."

"It's the beginning, or the resumption, of a general massive assault on our instituti0115) conducted by perhaps fifty Silk runners," Breaker said. "They're aware of our activity, apparently are frightened by it, and are taking measures to counter it."

Sound recordings followed, several phone calls from outside the FBI headquarters to offices within.

"The callers claim to be relatives," Breaker said. "Often dead relatives. They read through lists of numbers and ask them to be repeated.

Nearly everyone repeats the numbers. Afterward, the agents remember only receiving blank phone calls."

"I'm familiar with the routine," I said.

"You can see the size of our problem," Breaker said.

"It's huge," I agreed. "I think you've waited too long."

Breaker lifted his eyebrow. "Possibly."

"Any word on Garvey and Crenshaw?" Ben asked.

"None," Breaker said. "We won't take any action against collusive agents until we have the situation well in hand. And until we know whether or not they were tagged."

"Give me a crack at them. I'll take action," Ben said in a low rumble.

"You are not essential to this operation, Mr. Bridger," Breaker warned. "I will remove you if necessary."

"Is there any food on board?" I asked, feeling particularly contrary. "None," Breaker said. "There's hot coffee. Very hot."

This army, I saw, would not be running on its stomach. The stomach and everything south could no longer be trusted.

8:00 p.m." AUGUST 14 MANHATTAN THE JeNER BUILDING, "ANTHRAX CENTRAL'

We drove down the wide alley behind the gray cube. I saw the steel door Ben had described, covered with acid swaths of graffiti. At a honk, the door was pushed open from the inside. Breaker and two other agents got out of our cars and conferred with figures from inside the building, wearing white decontamination suits. They gestured and talked for some time.

I looked through the window at the blank expanse of stone and concrete rising to a sunny morning sky. New York was putting on its best face. It was going to be a beautiful day.

My entire self had shrunk to a little point. Exhausted, wrung out, the point was vaguely aware of the past, intensely connected with the present, unwilling to consider the future. It was only loosely related to the former Prince Hal and all his desires.

I was an animal, a cat, a bear, a rabbit. I did not want to be human.

Breaker returned to the car and tapped the glass. The driver rolled my window down, and Breaker leaned over. "We're clear, but our opposition within the Agency and the rest of the government could join the party at any minute, so we have to move fast. Offense has finished, security is in, and a technical team will be here soon to back you up. Ready?"

1 nodded, lying.

Breaker opened the door. Ben got out on the other side and puffed his cheeks, sucking in some courage from the air. "I do not want to go back in there," he said. "That means I have to."

"Right," Breaker said. Not a smile between them. A rigor and honor thing I certainly did not feel.

I was terrified, but I would do it for Rob.

We walked through the steel door. Immediately inside, four men in white-plastic suits with clear flexible helmets helped us put on similar outfits and attached our tanks. We had three hours of air, assuming moderate exertion.

I looked around the loading dock as the men adjusted my straps. Directly ahead, the big aquariums Ben had described had been shot up and drained, leaving the dock floor wet and smelling of saltwater. To the right, I counted twenty bodies arranged in rows under white sheets. A man in a transparent plastic outfit was dousing them with antiseptic from a pump cylinder, like a gardener spraying lilies.

I was ready. One of the white-plastic suits gave me a gloved thumbs-up.

"Can you hear me?" Ben asked. His voice was a little muffled, but carried clearly enough.

Everyone I saw looked pasty and unhappy, and no wonder. We rely on our little bacterial allies. They do a lot of work for us. They are vigilant defenders as well as, at times, harsh judges. Now we were trying to get along without these support systems. We had turned our guts into war zones.

Breaker took us up the steel steps to the platform. I looked through the shattered glass of the nearest aquarium. Slime and big black lumps rose from a thin slick of water.

"What was this?" Breaker asked, too loud, like someone speaking while wearing headphones. He pointed at the slime.

"Little Mothers of the World?" I guessed, and shrugged my shoulders,

"I still don't get the crap about "Little Mothers," " Ben said.

"Bacterial colonies from the sea--those black lumps could be stromatolites. Golokhov wanted to study how bacteria form communities. Maybe it was mystical, like keeping the bones of a saint. Maybe he thought we're all just evolved super-colonies of bacteria, spaceships for bacteria, with no will of our own. That sort of crap."

A formal young woman with an experienced no-nonsense face and buzz-trimmed inch-long hair met with our group. She carried an assault rifle with a prominent clip. "Secret Service, Nancy ," she said through her plastic hood. "Follow me." Her eyes were focused and unemotional, but her lips, tight and grim, betrayed her. She was scared, too.

"We've restored some power," she told us, as we marched behind the shattered aquariums. "The elevators are still out. Each floor has its own power supply, but some cables were cut and generators sabotaged. Right here"--she pointed at the concrete floor--"we're above three levels of basement, going down about fifty feet. We haven't explored the lowest level, but it seems to be mostly storage and infrastructure--air-conditioning, steam plant, water, the pumps that maintained the aquariums. There are subway tunnels below that, so

we'we had trains halted until we certify the building is not rigged to blow."

"How many died?" I asked.

"Enough," Delbarco said in a tone that implied it was a rude question. "I don't know how long we can stay. There could be an opposition team arriving any minute, and we certainly don't want to get involved in another firefight."

"We're still not in complete control either at the top or locally," Breaker said.

"Garvey?" Ben asked.

"His bosses have influence," Breaker conceded.

Delbarco led us up a long flight of stairs. The lighting was dismal. The painted steel stair treads showed shiny wear patterns. Peering up past the center railing, I could see all the way to the top of the building-sixteen stories.

"The first four floors are vats and steel culture tanks, like a brewery," Delbarco said. "Most haven't been used for a long time. It's difficult to conceive why they would need so much tagging material, but we could be making a bad guess. The techs will get samples when they arrive."

"That was what my brother wanted," I said absently.

Three floors. It was tough getting enough air in the hood, but I was doing okay. Ben was working to conceal his condition, or lack of it.

Delbarco pushed open the door on the fourth floor. We walked over a shiny, vitreous blue-gray floor between shadowed rows of steel vats, the largest twenty feet high and ten feet wide, surrounded by cooling coils and forests and arches of color-coded piping. At the opposite end, a glass-walled laboratory stood empty, its benches sparkling clean and cabinets bare. Two of the wide panes of glass had been shot out and lay in jagged shards all over the floor.

A body lay slumped against the only intact pane: a slender young

woman in her late teens, a small hole dimpling her forehead and a puddle of blood under her thighs. She had once had the intense, lean beauty of an Eastern Bloc gymnast. She wore denim overalls and a red T-shirt.

Delbarco walked past the corpse. "We've got some children, live children, quite a few of them, on the eighth floor," she said. "They don't have weapons, none we can see at any rate, so we're just ... working around them for the moment."

I thought of Nicolae Ceausescu, former dictator of Romania, recruiting his core bodyguards from orphanages, raising kids from childhood to serve in a kind of Praetorian Guard. He had been deposed and executed in 1989. His kids had supported him fanatically to the very end. They had had to be put down like rabid dogs.

"I'd like to see the children," I said. "Are they under supervision?"

"No. As I said, we're leaving them alone for now. They could be booby-trapped or contaminated." She was eager to change the subject. "We don't think there's been any real activity in most of the building for some time. Even most of the lighting fixtures have had their bulbs pulled out."

"I need to see the kids," I insisted. "I want to know how they were being used."

Delbarco reluctantly agreed. I was the expert, and she had her orders, even though it could be her funeral as well. So I was actually in charge. I didn't like it. We all followed Breaker to the next floor. In the stairwell, we walked around another body, a young man no more than twenty years old, sprawled faceup and studying the next flight of stairs with relaxed dismay. He had made random finger-twitch scrawls, then started to write two letters in a river of his own blood as it dripped from tread to tread. The letters were Cyrillic, and A. Perhaps he was writing his name, perhaps a farewell to friends.

"Where are the defense troops?" Ben asked.

"We pulled them out once the building was secure. We're shorthanded everywhere," Breaker said.

The eighth floor looked like a state hospital suddenly fallen on hard times. A deserted reception desk stood at the center of a semicircular room. Six hallways radiated outward like a sunburst in the surrounding square of the floor plan. At the end of one corridor, in the blinking glare of a single fluorescent light, I saw a gymnasium: pommel horse, stacked play mats, parallel bars, hanging rings.

"We don't want to be here too long," Delbarco said.

No sunshine. No windows. Never a chance to go outdoors.

I turned left and walked down a hall, stopped, looked into the first open door. Lights flickered in broken ceiling fixtures. Scattered papers, a kicked-in television, blood tracked and smeared by boots. A Come to Middle Earth poster from the 1960s competed with kids' drawings of dragons, a hook-nosed witch, airplanes. Below them, a white enameled iron bed frame supported a bare mattress, the sheets torn off and coiled on the floor. In one corner, someone had left a small pile of yellow turds. Broken glass everywhere.

From the end of the hall came singing, thin but lovely--a young boy or girl. It sounded like a Russian folk song. Closer, I heard crying. I walked past two closed doors, half-expecting a teenager with an Uzi to come leering out and spray us with bullets. Or for the ceiling to crack open and pour down gallons of tagging solution mixed with needles, piercing our suits. Anything was possible. I had been through too much to disbelieve.

The door to my right opened on a room full of steel bathtubs-hydrotherapy, I guessed, but then I saw the tubs were crusted with a dry yellow paste. I was glad to be in the suit and unable to smell the outside air.

This was what Tammy had described to Ben and Rob--a training area. A bathhouse of bacterial indoctrination. Mrs. Golokhova had had

to make do, however; she wasn't able to afford space on the world's biggest cruise ship. Did she keep up any contact at all with her husband?

I couldn't picture them lingering over long phone calls like separated lovers.

I slowed at the sound of footsteps. A black girl in a long white gown emerged from a door in the middle of the hall. She was accompanied by a toddler with a thin face and long, silky blond hair, clinging with white fists to her ragged nightgown. They stared at me with suspicious, puffy eyes.

The older girl barked something in Russian. I looked at Ben, a few paces behind me. He shook his head.

I waved my hands at the girl, no savvy, and stared at her bare forearms. Long pink scars reached from her wrists to at least her elbows, where they vanished beneath wide, flopping sleeves. In her long brown fingers she clutched a plastic ampoule with a dangling tube attached to an IV needle.

Three more children emerged from other doors in the hall and walked forward, wary but curious.

The black girl shook her head, then pointed her fingers into her mouth, eyes staring defiantly: Food, you son of a bitch, get it?

A boy of eight or nine padded across the floor in rubber-soled slippers. Yellow strips like plasterboard patches crisscrossed his shaven crown. His eyes were angelically calm, and he grinned as his slippers alternately slapped and squeaked on the hard blue floor.

Ben touched my elbow, giving me a start. "Let's go," he said. "Nothing we can do, and no sense taking risks. We don't know what was going on here."

I could hazard a guess. The older children, Mrs. Golokhova's assistants, the same ones who had come out to see Ben and Rob in the loading dock, must have tried to protect the younger. The first team in had killed everyone on the lower floors. Not that many, I guessed; a small operation.

"Mrs. Golokhova was still doing research. She maintained her own runners and subjects," I said. I shouted to Breaker and Delbarco, "Can you get some food for these kids?"

The black girl glared at us critically from a distance of ten feet. She seemed reluctant to come closer, as reluctant as I was to have her so near. I studied her skin, finely wrinkled, her knowing, weary eyes, and was suddenly not at all certain of her age.

She tried me again with another imperative string of Russian. I could only lift my shoulders in ignorance. Disgusted, she flung her ampoule, needle swinging. It bounced off my plastic-sleeved arm and rolled on the floor. I searched the arm frantically for tears as she laughed.