That week had started in promising fashion but quickly turned sour, which proves you should never get too charmed by beginnings. First thing on Tuesday morning, Jennifer put Chandler to work identifying the people in the six photos. Chandler claimed it was tough work—“busting my balls,” was the nice way he put it. In each shot, there were sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen people, but approximately half overlapped from one picture to another, presumably one year to the next. There were forty-seven unique individuals. Most of them appeared younger than the woman Jen and Chandler had seen from behind. Of the fourteen older ones, equal numbers clearly self-identified as male or female, and two did not. They knew they’d be lucky if their woman was in one of those photos. However, now viewing the figures from the front, Chandler was able to compare the slope of the shoulders he remembered, and at least get some hints from the hair, although that might have changed between then and now. They narrowed it down to three women.
The first was a woman Jen hadn’t needed Chandler to ID. She was a flamboyant entrepreneur who had died two years before in a staggeringly expensive tourist jaunt around the moon.
The second was born in Hong Kong, to Chinese and Dutch parents. She was now based near Bordeaux, although that didn’t mean anything—she could be here in a few hours. She had been a big deal in Shell Oil. She now had massive holdings in power generation and, apparently as her idea of a hobby, she co-owned Château Rothschild.
The third was a US-Swiss citizen who flitted between New York, DC, and Zurich. Teena Archambault had made her first five hundred million as an investment banker. She had served in the US Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce and still seemed to have strong political connections. She had more or less retired, but after the treatment—she apparently chose to stay in her sixties, although she could redo that later—she’d returned to work as senior vice president for government relations for GPRA, part of the consortium that produced the treatment.
Twenty minutes later, Jen was on the roof with Captain Brooks. The harsh morning sun ricocheted off the surrounding buildings, and Jen again needed to cup her hand across her forehead to keep her eyeballs from frying. Ten seconds up here and her body was feeling sticky; by the one-minute mark, sweat was dribbling down her face and neck and from her underarms down her sides. And it took only another minute for the sweat to evaporate into the windy, parched air. It was ninety-five degrees of misery on the streets. The roof must have been a hundred and ten.
“How did you identify her?” Brooks asked.
“It was Chandler.”
“And you’d seen her just that once at O’Neil’s club a month ago—”
“Three and a half weeks ago.”
“—yet he was still able to make the match?”
The wind whipped Jen’s hair into her face.
“And all this because you remembered the similarity between what this woman said and Teko Teko Mea?” Brooks pressed.
“That’s not his real name.”
“No?”
“Chandler figured that out too. In Maori, Mea more or less means ‘what’s-his-name.’ And Teko Teko means ‘nonsense.’ He’s making fun of us.”
“Why would he do that?”
“His real name is Taika Mete. He’s head of security for Xeno/Roberts/Chu. The pharmaceutical company.”
“I know who they are.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Give me a moment.”
Brooks pulled a phone from his pocket, which surprised her, because she’d seen him leave his mobile on his desk before they came up here. He wandered away from her to the edge of the roof, and a moment later was speaking quietly to someone.
When he returned, he said, “It’s good work, Jen. What you found out. It’s exceptionally good work.”
She smiled, but only enough to say thank you without making a big deal out of it.
“This is going to stay between us for now, right?”
“Yes sir,” she said, but she still wondered what the hell was going on.
After a long pause, he said, “Tell me, Jen.”
Tell me, she thought. This didn’t sound anything like the Captain Brooks she’d known for years.
“Tell me why you turned Chandler off back in June?”
“Sir?”
“I’m curious. I’d like to know.”
She wondered if this was a trick, or perhaps a test. And yet she suddenly wanted to tell him the truth. Not to impress him, not to please him, but to tell him the truth.
“Chandler’s great, but … well, I wanted to be by myself for a minute. That’s all.”
He nodded.
She said, “Why are you asking, sir?”
He ignored her question. “Run the whole thing by me again. What each of them said. What you found out about them.”
As she began her recitation, she noticed pale smoke coming from the direction of Rock Creek Park. By the end of her summation it was dark and thick.
“Sir.” She pointed behind him. “I think there’s a fire in the park.”
A year of drought had been capped by the past six weeks without a single drop of rain. Rock Creek Park was an enormous pile of dried wood waiting for a match. Since its sale to Disney, the National Park Service had defunded services in all its parks that didn’t charge admission, so NPS was no help. The creek itself was down to a trickle, and the only hydrants were in places like the planetarium and the neighborhoods that wiggled along the edges of the park. The flames fed on dead leaves and bone-dry wood, and the wind was like a giant bellows, whipping fire from one tree to the next and sending sparks shooting through the air. Fire engines roared in from across DC and the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, but even a thousand gallons from a tanker truck was no match for the rapidly spreading blaze. Within two hours, the southern half of the forest was in flames. Fire engines surrounded the park from Military Road on down and shot so much water from hydrants onto the trees and lawns around its perimeter that water pressure plummeted in the rest of the city. By then, air tankers had arrived from Pennsylvania and Virginia and were dumping tens of thousands of gallons of water and fire retardant.
Jennifer and Brooks had charged downstairs and, like just about every other cop in the city, rushed to the fire wearing their N95s or half facepiece respirators. Uniforms were stationed in points surrounding the park to keep onlookers away, help emergency vehicles get through, and redirect cars that were overriding their emergency rerouting. Other officers evacuated schools, daycare centers, and nursing homes that were downwind of the fire. Jen was one of many assigned to go door to door, urging people to grab their ID, a few valuables, and prescription meds, and evacuate, not only because of the possibility their house could be eaten by flames, but because smoke was engulfing the southeast side of the park and beyond.
By the early afternoon, they caught a break. The morning’s fierce winds from the northeast ended. Smoke now billowed straight into the air. The fire was no longer being fanned, and sparks were no longer shooting to other trees or surrounding neighborhoods.
By the end of the day, the fire ran out of fuel. The southern half of the park was a cemetery of smoldering skeletons of trees. The planetarium, where the fire appeared to have started, was destroyed. Fourteen people had died from smoke inhalation or traffic accidents. An estimated six thousand people were taken to the hospital with severe respiratory problems, and by the end of the week, two hundred and fifty-eight of them were dead. A newlywed couple who had set off on a picnic were never found and were presumed incinerated. Twenty horses that couldn’t be evacuated on time from the Horse Center had burned to death. The fire hadn’t reached up to the new Viridian Green Country Club nor down to the Smithsonian Zoo, although heavy smoke had left dozens of animals either dead or very sick. Miraculously, only thirty neighboring houses had burned down, but hundreds had been soaked through by jets of water to prevent the fire from spreading. Thirty thousand people were in emergency shelters, and many more were with friends, although most were expected to return home in the next few days. Buildings, particularly to the southeast, were blackened by ash. The gleaming white dome of the Capitol, directly in the path of the predominant wind, was now gray.
Much of DC smelled like a giant campfire. Luckily, it was mainly the clean smell of wood smoke rather than the sour stench of extinguished house fires. Columbia Heights had caught a lot of smoke and ash, but Leah and Raffi had been home and had managed to shut their windows and those of their downstairs neighbors before they had fled. They had returned at dinnertime. The roof was dusted with a half inch of ash, but inside wasn’t bad. Or rather, Jen was so saturated with smoke that she wouldn’t have smelled anything if she had stuck her head into a fireplace.
Water was being rationed throughout DC, but for the thirty minutes it flowed to Columbia Heights, they showered and filled buckets, cooking pots, sinks, and the bathtub, so Jen managed to wash the ashes, sweat, and grime off herself.
They ate dinner, falling silent whenever a voice on the news feed caught their attention. Otherwise, they did what hundreds of thousands of other DC residents were doing at that moment: exchanged stories and expressed their total disbelief that this awful event had happened. And then suddenly the four of them, overwhelmed, would become mute.
Zach had to go out for a CASP meeting to thrash out a statement about the fire, the continuing impact of climate change, and the need for greater action. Jen kissed him goodnight and crawled into bed at nine. Only then did she check the messages that had accumulated that day, and spotted the notice from the clinic where she’d been tested at the end of the previous week.
The first screen said, These are your test results for ROSE markers. You may wish to be with your doctor, health care professional, or religious official when you read the results.
Screw it, she thought. I’m tough.
The short message was wrapped in niceties and probabilities and encouraging new research. But the basic meaning was, Dear Jen. You’re screwed.
She had tested positive for the presence of the prions that, unless she received some version of the treatment, would spread and kill her in an absolutely terrifying and horrible way.
Fortunately, she was going to make sure her mother did her duty and exited in seven weeks. Jen would receive the attenuated treatment. She was tough; she would be fine.
And yet, she ran to the bathroom and threw up.
Is anyone, she wondered, tough enough to receive a death sentence, even if they’re pretty sure it’s going to be commuted?
The next two days passed in a blur as Jen, Les, Hammerhead, and Amanda joined hundreds of other cops trudging from apartment to apartment, and house to house, ensuring that everyone was accounted for and no one was having severe health problems. Perhaps it was this enervating task, but she found it impossible to shake off a deep sense of dread. Her test results. The beautiful park gone. The recent turmoil with Zach. A flash of Richard O’Neil and the disturbing question of why the hell she was still thinking about him. Despair ambushed her when she was least expecting it.
On the other hand, although she didn’t have the time or energy to think much about Teena Archambault or Taika Mete, it was hard not to keep coming back to the lethal counterfeit treatment. There were daily reports of more deaths in DC and other cities. Everyone in the city—and all across the country—was receiving hyperbolic text alerts from the DEA and local health officials cautioning them about the illegal treatment. The messages ended in uppercase letters: REPORT ANYONE SELLING THIS DRUG. HELP SAVE A LIFE!
Meanwhile, police in four cities, including DC, had made their first arrests, but so far these had led nowhere. There were two doctors, one nurse, an ex-army medic, one veterinarian, a pharmacist, and a med student. All had been approached by phone to do one set of treatments. All received the meds and instructions by a drop that couldn’t be traced. All had, as instructed, burned whatever they could when they finished and destroyed the rest. None could identify anyone. All had been promised a hefty payment and all had been stiffed. All were charged with a dozen things, including manslaughter.
A report raced through the police force that the fire had been started by four Timeless who had sedated and then burned themselves on a funeral pyre built behind the Planetarium. There had been an online suicide note: Just let us die. Yeah, and take a park with you. But this got no mention in any of the media, and by the next day, there seemed to be no one who had actually read the note or had evidence of a group suicide.
The growing alarm about the deadly instant-aging counterfeit treatment, combined with the destruction of so much of the park, created a widespread feeling of impending doom. A child’s two-hour disappearance became a ring of child snatchers; an electrical brownout became the likelihood of a total breakdown of the power grid; the departure of the president and vice president for summer holidays became their escape before a major terrorist incident ripped apart the city. For Jennifer, the sense of doom was aggravated by her test results—about which she still hadn’t breathed a word to Zach or anyone else.
And into the mix came the first attempt in five years to organize a protest against exit and the restrictions on the attenuated treatment. And there they were, Jen and Zach, having recently made up and now on opposite sides of the barricades.