They flew Pete to a drab Alliance office building near Atlanta, and for two days they debriefed him. Quickly, Pete could tell, they deemed him unreliable. The funny thing was, in the entire time, no one told him directly his wife was dead; no one said a word about it. They showed him photographs of the destroyed resort. They showed him a breakdown of all the people killed, listed by nationality. Pamela was on the list, just one name among many. They explained, in abstract, how the human remains would be disposed of and the cover story that they’d come up with: natural gas explosion. It was in their eyes, he could see it; they knew that his wife was among the dead. But it was as if everyone assumed that someone else had said the words to him, a legion of psychiatrists, engineers, and generals. No one offered a word of apology. Or asked him for contrition.
Another sure sign of his fall was the reduction in his access. He wanted to look at the drone programming, to see where it could have gone so wrong. There was no way a drone should have traveled that far, and that far inland. There had to be a glaring error somewhere in the program, and he was certain he could find it if they would just let him. But the Alliance suddenly isolated him from the drones, from the team, from any of the technology that he once knew so intimately. It was a new level of autonomy, Pete thought wryly. Now the drones operated without even the participation of their creator.
Suddenly idle, with more spare time than he’d had in years, Pete began looking for reports of other rogue drones. He had a solid Internet connection in the temporary office where they’d stashed him, and he could see the videos as they popped up. He watched them until they were suppressed, usually within minutes. A bomb dropped on a ferry near Seattle. The video showed screaming commuters in suits scrambling to climb the sides of the boat as it turned over. Another bomb fell on a cargo terminal in Los Angeles, setting it on fire. That clip was of unusually good quality, showing the lone drone swooping in gracefully, dropping its bomb, then peeling away. Most were on the West Coast, although Pete saw a reliable clip from as far inland as Reno, Nevada, where a drone dropped a bomb on a truck stop, igniting a spectacular fire as the fuel tanks exploded. The drone then recognized how far it was from Eris, and the impossibility of rearming, and went into self-destruct mode, flying directly into a semitruck that was trying desperately to drive away on Interstate 80.
* * *
Pete was shuffled in and out of a number of remote offices, always well away from the drone program. At first he thought he would be assigned to a place where he would be closely watched. But instead, the Alliance, in its bureaucratic wisdom, just gave him a series of meaningless assignments where he could do little harm while still remaining under their control. All were within the Alliance’s vast research apparatus. He worked on a team studying the effects of paint colors on a submarine crew’s mental health: dark orange was best, red the worst. He worked briefly on a program that was evaluating the use of airships as surveillance platforms: their slow speeds and steady movements allowed for a kind of high resolution that wasn’t possible from planes or satellites. After that, he was given orders to a research detachment in Frederick, Maryland. He scanned his orders at a hotel bar as he drank his third overpriced martini. Something to do with the flu.
The next morning, he walked the two blocks to his new office, hoping the cool air would mitigate his hangover. He checked the address twice when he arrived. The military leaders of a past era had sought to intimidate and impress with their structures, the Pentagon being the ultimate example: a city unto itself in a mythic, magical shape. The Alliance, Pete had learned, sought the opposite; they wanted to disguise and obscure the true scope of their power by distributing their vast resources across anonymous leased offices and buildings across the land. Like the drones, the Alliance sought security in redundancy, and vast, wide distribution. Such networks, Pete well knew, were almost impossible to kill. The building where Pete reported had just six stories, of which the Alliance occupied only the top floor. The ground floor contained a Subway sandwich shop and a dentist’s office. One of the other tenants in the building was a financial advisor, whose darkened windows and security door looked far more secretive than the Alliance office where Pete found himself that morning, with its unlocked front door, unmanned reception desk, and new carpet smell.
Inside the suite, he found his way to office 16-E, where the door was locked. There was a keypad, but he had no code. He rang a buzzer, and could hear movement inside. He could tell the door was solid; he’d been behind enough serious security doors to recognize one when he saw it: the heavy weight, the precise balancing, the hidden hinges. He heard a click within the door, and he pushed it open.
Inside were two men, looking up at him somewhat suspiciously from their drab metal desks. They were at opposite ends of the small office, as far apart as they could arrange: Pete sensed instantly that the two men didn’t like each other. A large, tattered world map had been hung from the center wall, a series of colored pins pressed into it. Above one man’s desk was a small flat-screen television, tuned to one of the news channels that was favorable to the Alliance, with the sound muted. The screen periodically seized and pixelated, as if the cable connection was poor.
“You the new officer in charge?”
“I am,” he said. “Pete Hamlin. Pleased to meet you. Is this the whole team?”
The younger man stood and raised his hands dramatically. “This is it. I’m Reggie Strack,” he said, walking over with a hand extended.
“You’re the doctor?”
“I am—your resident physician. Epidemiologist. Serving the Alliance by combatting the flu.”
“How long?”
“Fighting the flu? My whole career. But I’ve only been working for the Alliance six months.” He had an earnest look, and a friendly, open manner.
The other man had made his way over. “Steve Harkness,” he said. “I’m an Alliance communications specialist.” Harkness was the kind of young man who exuded ambition. His clothes were casual, but neatly pressed and well tailored, the kind of garments worn by a man who occasionally expected, or hoped, to be photographed. “I’m here to get the word out, raise awareness both about the flu and the Alliance’s efforts to help the sick and find a cure.”
He stopped. Pete was aware that both men were sizing him up, deciding whether or not they could trust him.
“So,” said Pete. His mouth was still dry from his hangover, his voice scratchy. “Is this a real disease, or a propaganda operation?”
Harkness winced at the word, but Strack laughed. “It is a real, frightening disease,” he said. “And this is a massive propaganda operation.”
* * *
Pete did the minimum amount of work he could do to get by, and spent the rest of his time alone to mourn Pamela. While he still wanted to figure out what had gone wrong, he was glad in a way that the Alliance hadn’t assigned him to anything to do with the drones. He loathed himself for his part in Pamela’s death, and had vivid nightmares in which he would follow a drone, in his mind, from Eris Island, where he had probably cheered its departure, to Mexico, where it dropped the single, ugly bomb that ended her life. He tried to fight it off, but he couldn’t help but imagine her final moments. Was she beside the pool, in one of the prized lounge chairs near the bar? Or was she in the water, lazily paddling back and forth as the men poolside watched her through their sunglasses? Maybe she was wading in the ocean, up to her knees in the sea, and saw the drone fly in. Perhaps she thought it was Pete’s plane in the distance, returning him to their honeymoon. He imagined her squinting at it curiously when she realized that this plane had no windows.
* * *
Pete’s team had weekly meetings in Silver Spring with other research groups, where they presented their findings to an indifferent panel of officers led by General Cushing, who always sat in the middle of the group and nodded his head, his strong hands folded in front of him. He rarely spoke, but when he did, the room always fell respectfully silent. He had a chest full of ribbons on an Army uniform, ribbons that Pete could tell, even from across the room, were regular Army commendations, not Alliance. He had a combat infantry badge and jump wings, and the ribbons themselves were the kind that you saw only on regular military officers. Alliance ribbons had a smooth appearance, colors that looked like they had been chosen carefully by focus groups and laid out by designers. Real military ribbons had a knotty, disorganized look, like combat itself, a random assortment of colors and patterns, here and there adorned with dark stars or a bronze V that Pete learned stood for Valor. Just as Alliance officers were being given military commands to demonstrate that they were all, in fact, one team, combat officers like Cushing were being given Alliance commands. He scowled continuously at their weekly meetings, like it was a duty he had accepted grudgingly, and he couldn’t wait to get back into a position where people were shooting at him.
Their weekly meetings took place every Tuesday, along with three other detachments. Each group was given fifteen minutes to talk, five minutes for each man on the team. Pete had no idea how many of these meetings the generals had to sit through in a week, how many well-polished five-minute speeches they had to endure. It was amazing, sometimes, how much information a man could cram into five minutes, and at times it was amazing how little. But the schedule never varied.
Strack, in his five minutes, would detail the latest outbreak numbers, emphasizing that the problem was uncontained. Harkness would describe, and occasionally show, the media campaigns that his group had created to promote hand washing and the idea that only the Alliance could find a cure. After they were done, Pete was offered a chance to elaborate, a chance he always declined, opening up five minutes on the agenda to someone more eager than he to kiss the ass of a table full of generals.
* * *
It was a forty-mile drive from Silver Spring back to Frederick. In bad traffic, it could take well over an hour, and Pete usually welcomed the time alone in his car. “Alone with his thoughts,” would be inaccurate. He preferred to be without thought entirely, his guilt-ridden mind wiped clean at least for a moment. Inching along in traffic was one of the few places he could actually achieve this thoughtless state. Most times he didn’t even turn his radio on.
Somewhere near Germantown, he got off of I-270 to get a cup of coffee. Traffic was inching along, and no one was expecting him back at the office anyway. Even off the interstate, though, traffic still crawled. It was starting to rain a dreary, light mist, and Pete wasn’t able to let his mind drift the way he wanted to in the stop-and-go traffic.
He came to realize that this was no normal traffic jam brought on by the daily commute; something was going on. Cops at intersections were directing traffic; barricades lined the road. Crowds of people were walking, all in the same direction he was driving, all traveling at roughly the same speed, allowing Pete to track the small groups that walked hand in hand down the sidewalk. It was the same kind of foot traffic you might see before a sporting event, a walk to the stadium—except this was a weekday, and these people didn’t look excited, they looked grim.
Many of them wore surgical masks.
He came to a complete stop by a low, brick building: the Germantown Community Recreation Center. Hastily made signs declared that PEOPLE WITH SYMPTOMS SHOULD NOT GET VACCINATED—SEE YOUR DOCTOR. Officials in masks directed people to various lines that came out of the doors and wrapped around the building. They were handing out masks, so everyone in line was wearing one. Paramedics waited lazily by ambulances; volunteers took down information with clipboards. Pete could see, inside the center’s double doors, hundreds of people in a dozen lines, or maybe it was just one line winding throughout the building. On the sidewalk near him, a mother was frantically talking to a bewildered volunteer. Her child, a girl maybe four years old, stared at Pete, only her eyes visible above a mask that was far too big for her small face.
A car behind him honked. Traffic had opened up. He pulled forward and found his way back to I-270.
* * *
Back in the office in Frederick, Pete flipped through Strack’s presentation from that morning.
“Do you realize you’re looking at my slides?” said Strack.
“I do,” said Pete.
“You’re going to ruin your reputation around here if you start participating.”
“It looks like it’s getting worse,” said Pete, stopping on a chart with the last six months of data.
“That’s why you’re in charge,” said Strack. “You read a bar graph like none other.”
Pete smiled. “Is it getting … deadlier? It seems like, looking at these numbers, the mortality rates are climbing.”
Strack shrugged. “The flu is one of the deadliest diseases in the world. Other diseases—lots of diseases—have higher mortality rates. Like Ebola. Or rabies. If rabies is untreated, you die, almost every time. But year after year, for most of modern history, the flu kills more people than anything else in terms of sheer numbers. And historically, it thrives during times of war, when people are traveling all over the place, food supplies and medical supplies are scarce. The 1918 flu pandemic, a direct result of World War I, might have killed a hundred million people: five percent of the world’s population. So yes … if that’s what you’re asking me. It’s real.”
“I wasn’t asking that,” said Pete.
Strack laughed. “Of course you were, don’t be shy. It’s hard to know what to believe right now, god knows. Hell, we’re at the heart of the bullshit machine right here in this office. But I’ve got the data, I’ve been to the hospitals, I’ve looked at the blood. This is real.”
“But just because it’s real—”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not propaganda,” said Strack. “Which is why, I’m sure, we’ve been given these luxurious accommodations and a communications specialist. And you.”
“So it is deadly. But is it anything new?”
“The flu is always new, that’s the devious nature of it. Each strain is unique. But overall—no. It’s not remarkably different in deadliness or virulence than any flu we’ve seen in the last hundred years. More deadly than some historical strains, less deadly than others. But no question we should be wary of it. Which is how I’m able to get to sleep at night.”
“How so?” said Pete.
Strack shrugged. “I’m not a dumbass. I know we’re milking this for propaganda value somehow, keeping the people in a panic. But maybe the work I do—we do—will help prevent the spread of it. Maybe we’ll stumble on something that helps keep influenza at bay from now on—it wouldn’t be the first time that a war effort has led to some concrete, lasting good. So that’s how I sleep at night.”
“I see.”
“How about you?”
“Me?” said Pete. “I don’t sleep at night. Ever.”
Strack chuckled nervously, but stopped when he saw that Pete wasn’t laughing with him.
Pete broke the silence and shoved a stack of a paper toward Strack. “Look at this.”
Strack looked them over. “Evacuations?”
“Mostly in coastal areas. To prevent the spread of the flu.”
“Where did you get these?”
“I’ve been requesting them for weeks, finally somebody slipped up and sent them to me.”
“But these don’t even … these areas have nothing to do with the flu. There’s no correlation at all.”
“I know,” said Pete. He’d already made some crude comparisons between the evacuations and Strack’s latest projections.
But they did correlate to areas that had been hit by drones, at least according to the radical blogs he was following now from Internet cafes across town.
“Weird,” said Strack. He squinted at the data again, and then back up at Pete, with newfound respect. “So let me ask you a question. As long as we’re being chummy with each other.”
“Go ahead,” said Pete.
“Why are you here? I mean, I looked you up. I know you were the hero of the drone program for a while. You’ve done more network news interviews in your life than anybody I know personally. Way more than Harkness, which I’m sure galls him, by the way. So how did you end up in this backwater of the Alliance?”
Pete thought it over for a long moment. “I think in part they put me here to get me out of the way. They didn’t think they could trust me anywhere near the drones anymore.”
“But why here, though? Why working on an obscure flu project? You used to be one of the chief badasses in the Alliance. Surely they could use you somewhere else.”
“Have you ever heard of Admiral Hyman Rickover?” asked Pete.
“No.”
“He was the father of the nuclear submarine. An engineering genius. Dreamed it up, fought for a decade to make it a reality while virtually everyone in the Navy and the Pentagon told him he was crazy. He’s a hero of mine.”
“Did he send you here?”
Pete laughed, something he didn’t do much anymore, but Strack had that ability. “No. But he once said something I think about a lot. ‘If you’re going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.’”
“So which did you sin against to end up here?”
Pete paused. “Both. But my point is: don’t make the mistake of trying to attribute too much logic to the bureaucracy. There might not be any good reason I’m here. I think they probably thought I could do very little damage here, while at the same time they could keep an eye on me.”
Strack shook his head. “As much as I hate to admit it, I don’t think you’re giving them enough credit.”
“How so?”
“You’re an inventor, right? You invented the drones. Now they want you to invent a flu epidemic. You convinced everybody that the drones were a game changer. They want you to do the same thing with the flu.”
Pete looked down at Strack’s slides again and pointed.
“Not me,” he said. “You’re the resident genius here, Strack.”
The young doctor held his arms up. “That’s what I keep telling everybody!”
“Are you the only one working on a cure for this thing?”
He shook his head. “No, not at all. My mission is really the epidemiology—the actual victims, the rates of transmission, things like that. Empirical data about the actual disease.”
“But somebody’s working on a cure, right?”
“Of course,” said Strack, shuffling through some papers on his desk. “Teams everywhere, in every Alliance country. But if you ask me, based on the reports I’m getting, the most promising work is being done here.” He handed Pete a black-and-white aerial photo of an island. “This is our most productive research station. They’re working in almost total isolation, and we have reason to think they’re getting close.”
Pete stared at the photograph of the barren island. The photograph was old, taken before his work there, before they’d carved out the airstrip and erected their tower. But he still recognized the kidney shape, the rocky bluff at the northern end, and the two flat buildings on the other side.
“I’m waiting for them to send me there,” said Strack. “Maybe they’ll send all of us, the whole team.”
“I’ve already been there,” Pete mumbled in shock.
“You have?” said Strack, confused. “When?”
Just then the door burst open and Harkness walked in, his blue suit immaculate, a broad smile on his face.
“Hello, team! What are you guys up to?”
“Defeating the enemy,” said Strack, turning back to his computer.
“Good,” said Harkness, failing to read the sarcasm. “I’ve got good news … they just doubled our funding. And they’re moving us across the hall to a bigger office, getting three more people on the team!”
“What happened?” said Pete.
“West Coast governors are freaking out. Two hundred people have died in San Diego this month.” He was beaming.