ALICE PACED HER CELL. SHE was apparently in custody, but there had been little ceremony about any of it. As a boundary pusher, Alice had been arrested before. There were always certain touchstones to the process: the reading of rights, fingerprinting, a single call on a station phone. But she hadn’t been read her rights — something Alice was holding close to the vest like a literal get-out-of-jail-free card. She hadn’t been fingerprinted. And the phone call (first to Ian then to August when Ian hadn’t answered) had been conducted on her phone, right from her pocket, before its confiscation.
Since then, she’d been left alone. Entirely, silently alone.
This wasn’t police. This was Panacea. And the minute Alice got out of here, she had one hell of a damning exposé to write about them.
She heard a lock turn. The door at the room’s far end opened, past the only other cell in the small space. A man came forward who looked nothing like an agent. He was maybe fifty, slightly overweight, with blond hair and soft, intelligent eyes.
He stood in front of Alice’s cell then reached up and unplugged something on the overhead security camera. The red light went dead.
“So you’re Alice Frank,” he said. “You seem taller in person.”
Alice’s eyes went to the camera. Was he planning to beat her up? Kill her? What didn’t he want surveillance to see, and would they simply not notice the missing feed?
There was no reason for timidity. She’d done nothing wrong. She’d been well within her rights as a member of the free press right up until the moment someone had released ferals in front of her. If they meant to silence her as extraneous to Ian Keys’s too important, she wasn’t about to die on her knees.
“And who the hell are you?”
“My name is Raymond Smyth.”
Alice’s forehead wrinkled. “I know that name.”
He nodded. “I’m Ian’s boss. I’m also Hemisphere’s liaison with Panacea. I imagine you came across my name in the documents I sent you. Or maybe the files I sent to Ian.”
“That was you. On the phone.”
“It was.”
Alice looked at the camera. At the cell. At the door to the outside hallway, firmly closed.
Smyth followed her eyes. “I’m not worried about us being overheard, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Why not?”
“This is a holding cell, not a jail. Everyone’s gone home for the night. It’s just me and you.”
“Why am I being held?” Alice demanded.
“Because you’re an enemy of the state, Ms. Frank. I’d have thought you’d’ve figured that out by now.” He gave a little shrug. “That’s also why I didn’t carry the ball myself. I didn’t particularly want to be in there with you.”
“So you just wanted someone else to do your dirty work.”
“It’s bigger than just me, Alice,” Smyth said, pulling a metal chair from a corner and sitting on it opposite her. “If someone was going to bring down Hemisphere, it couldn’t happen from the inside.”
“Why not? You recruited Ian.”
“Ian was necessary. He has access to the information I needed to push at him, in which our mutual friend August will find more than meets the eye. That information needed to be carried out of the building, not sent, or it’d have been detected. Ian has sufficient access to get whatever else August may need to make his case. And Ian can get him into the labs, where he can confirm it.”
“Why not you?”
“Because I’m necessary, too. We all have our parts to play. And when the three of you tell the world what it needs to know, I’ll be right where I need to be. Because the truth will come out, but Hemisphere is, to borrow an old expression, ‘too big to fail.’”
Alice exhaled, unsure what to say. She held the cell’s bars, wanting to shake them, to demand more information from this maddeningly calm man.
“How are we going to bring it down, then?” Alice asked.
“About a half hour ago, Ian Keys’s access signature was used to gain entry to our modeling software. We both know that you sent Ian to August earlier tonight, so that’s August’s hand inside the system, not Ian’s. It seems August is as brilliant as he always was. I’ve tried to work out what exactly Archibald was hiding, but I’m not a scientist. August went for the throat from another angle, once he knew it had something or other to do with BioFuse.”
“You said something about that earlier. About BioFuse,” Alice said, more intrigued than angry — and less mad than she wanted to be. She’d been sure for years that Hemisphere was hiding something, that their swooping in to save the day and make their hundreds of billions was too convenient. She wanted to know the story’s resolution, even if she’d been pinched in the process.
“Yes. That’s all I knew: that there was something concealed and that BioFuse was part of it. And that Archibald buried those nuggets deeper than the rest. I’ve grown to know him quite well and can read him like a book. But he can read me, too. I couldn’t ask. I couldn’t dig. I don’t have the science to understand it anyway. But August could. And you could blow the whistle while I stayed close.”
“Close to Archibald Burgess?”
“Yes. The shell of this company will need to survive, and the brain behind it needs to stay on call. Because the world relies on Necrophage, right or wrong.”
“Wrong,” Alice said, waiting for more, asking a question without asking at all.
“August has concluded that Hemisphere engineered Sherman Pope. That it modified our earlier drug BioFuse to do more than repair Alzheimer’s — to repair bodies and brains even as they fell apart and went mad. It makes sense. Even the worst ferals only decay so far. We’ve seen it in Bakersfield and in Yosemite. They reach a point of stability, where the disease props them up just as quickly as it dies.”
Alice felt her legs want to wobble. Somewhere deep down, her gut had suggested something this dark, but that was only morose fantasy. Hemisphere had saved untold millions of lives with Necrophage. But it had killed just as many before the cure had been found … or, more likely, before it had been released, ready to sojourn into the world and usher in profit.
Alice looked at Smyth then around at her cell. The unspoken question finally fell from her lips.
“Are you going to let me out of here?”
“No.”
Alice blinked. “What? Why not? I thought you were one of the good guys. You started this. You stuffed me and Ian together so I could blab about whatever he and August found. You turned off the goddamned camera when you came in here, for Christ’s sake!”
Smyth seemed analytical, unconcerned. He crossed his legs and said, “When you came in here, did they offer you a phone call?”
“You just said that I ‘sent Ian to August tonight.’”
“So I surmised. But I didn’t ask if you called anyone. I asked if it was offered.”
“It was offered. But I wasn’t read my rights, and that’s … ”
Smyth looked disappointed. Alice trailed off.
“What?” she asked.
Smyth seemed to search for a place to begin. Then: “There’s a rather strong partnership between Hemisphere, who manufactures the drug that keeps the infected safe, and Panacea, who does its work more directly out on the streets. That partnership kept the outbreak inside US borders. Hemisphere’s knowledge and Panacea’s muscle established the Yosemite preserve. They kept the public’s hearts and minds on an even keel. My job is to lubricate that partnership. But recently I’ve begun to fear that something is changing.”
“Changing how?”
“They let you make that call to August, about Ian. I’m sure you were careful with your words, but the fact that they let you make the call at all — that they practically requested you make it — makes me wonder what Panacea knows and where their allegiances lie.”
“You think — ”
“Panacea should feel the same as Hemisphere. They should want the truth about the disease’s origins concealed. But lately I’ve seen signs that they feel differently. Prompting your call, perhaps with knowledge of what you know and are attempting to do. Allowing you to use your own phone, which would suggest to August that you were free to speak, at least to some degree. But there’s more. Things like this attack, in the mall. It’s not the only one there’s been, you know.”
“There have been other outbreaks?” Alice shivered. Of course; there were always small fires that Panacea was sent into the wild lands to quell, or into urban areas to extinguish. But never inside Dead City itself. And never …
Alice almost didn’t want to ask.
“Outbreaks like that one?” she finished.
Smyth nodded. “They have to be grown that way. Kept chained and untreated then injected with Necrophage after they’ve passed the critical inflection point and can no longer be saved.”
“Why would anyone do that?”
“Because Necrophage halts degradation and makes some repairs, essentially ticking the clock backward on decay by a few days or a week after the first bolus. In a percentage of cases, those treated after — but very recently after — their point of no return retain enough bodily strength to do what you saw earlier today. They can run. And fight.”
Alice felt a charge fill her. She had to get out of here. The public needed to know all of this, regardless of which pieces she could prove.
“And there have been whispers from my contacts on the Panacea side about solutions to a problem at Yosemite that isn’t being shared with me. Rumors being spread about Necrophage itself: that its effectiveness may be diminishing. Which, to my knowledge, is entirely false. But it seems to me that Panacea is trying to do something, and that it’s seeding fear as a weapon.”
“So let me out. I can time a release for Hemisphere’s big feel-good press event tomorrow. Let me blow the whistle.”
“Not just yet,” Smyth said, falling into a fugue of concentration.
“Why the hell not?”
Smyth stood. Then he turned and left, leaving the camera disconnected.
Alice started screaming.