She turned back to her screen. On the window, a news website showed streaming video of protesters beginning to gather for the next day’s public display of citizen gun power. Mostly white men, wearing camouflage or green, milling the National Mall, looking at the National Guardsmen, stoically standing with automatic rifles strapped against their chests. The guardsmen peered back. They scanned the crowd for weapons. A policeman with a megaphone repeated that “citizens who open-carry weapons without a permit will be subject to arrest.” Salivating journalists dotted the mall, setting the stage for tomorrow’s possible conflagration. “Twelve hours and counting,” a sideline reporter said, trying to sound concerned about this prospect: Would a protester open fire? A cop?; Would you be arrested if you had an open-carry permit from your home state?; Would it become a firefight? The reporter said: “It’s a tinderbox.”
“Get a load of this, Alex,” Jackie said to her comatose coworker. “We could look like heroes. Shutting it all down, hitting pause, right before all hell breaks loose.”
She looked at Alex and then back at the screen.
She clicked into a box reading China Telecom.
13:45:18
13:45:17
Forty-Four
The drive took place largely in silence, aside from the slipstream of wind seeping into the car. The Miata was not built for road trips. It was loud and cramped. And goose chase didn’t begin to capture the quixotic basis for the trip. Each, though, had motivations. Jerry, who fashioned himself as a man of action, wasn’t about to sit around and let this infuriating moment pass without doing something. Plus, this Lyle guy irked the shit out of him, the more so because Jerry saw some connection between Lyle and Eleanor. I’ve got your back, he thought to himself as he watched Eleanor, and you’ll be grateful for it when the time comes.
Eleanor had made a simple calculation that it made more sense to go than not. But it wasn’t satisfying in the least because the margin of her decision was razor thin, like 51 percent to 49 percent. Or maybe her decision was more of a plurality: 50 percent go on a goose chase; 49 percent don’t go; 1 percent have no freaking clue, or what’s the alternative?
Two things pushed her over the top. One was that someone had died on her airplane, an old man, and she knew—absolutely knew—that she’d done nothing wrong to cause that. The second thing was that, on some basic level, she trusted this Dr. Martin. Such an odd combination of guileless and cunning. Not evil cunning, or wily, but brilliant cunning. She’d looked him up on the Internet before their first meeting. She knew what he’d been once. She was left to wonder what had caused him to come undone. It bore watching. She sat in silence in the passenger seat, trying to take in as much information as she might, watching the side of the increasingly dark road disappear in the rearview mirror.
For his part, Lyle had moved beyond thinking and into instinct. The frontal lobe of his brain, the part involved in decision making and higher-level analysis, would be surprisingly free of activity at times like these. What prevailed was free association, the appearance in his mind’s eye of ideas that might be loosely described as taking the shape of puzzle pieces. He tried to link them and, sometimes, frustrated, he would emit a sound of disgust. In a couple of these moments, Eleanor would glance at Jerry, which would send her first officer into a pleasure spiral because the two of them were seeing eye-to-eye. Jerry felt the shape of his gun in his back holster and he smiled.
They pulled off at an exit just before nine o’clock looking for gas and food.
At the Chevron, Jerry fueled up and they all stared at the video monitor located on the pump. It was a split screen, one side featuring an ad with an adorable-looking cartoon car smiling because it was being filled up with Chevron gas; the other side showed marchers descending on the Washington Mall. One held a placard with an automatic weapon drawn on it. He was being confronted by a young person poking a finger in his chest.
Jerry looked at Lyle.
“What is it with you and this woman?” Jerry asked.
“I don’t know. Other than…” Lyle’s back ached from the small backseat confines. “How much do you guys know about the immune system?”
“Fights disease,” Jerry said.
“Exactly. The way it does so is kind of incredible. First, it has to recognize a threat. There are trillions of possible alien threats and some of them can look a lot like normal cells. So that’s no small feat. Then it has to—”
“Please tell me he’s going somewhere with this,” Jerry whined condescendingly to Eleanor.
“I think so.”
Jerry pulled out of the gas station and into the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger and took a spot while Lyle explained how the immune system has to look for subtle signs of a dangerous, often deadly, invader, then look for ways to attach to those cells and figure out how to produce proteins capable of attacking the offender. It is an extremely delicate task, arguably the most sophisticated cat-and-mouse game in the world.
“I think she wants to see if I can discover her and then…” He paused. “She’s putting out these clues. She’s trying to get seen, or discovered.”
“Pretty damn narcissistic if you ask me,” Jerry added.
Lyle pushed air out of his lips, realizing he wasn’t making a lot of sense. It was the risk of putting theories out before they were fully baked. He knew there was more to this idea in his head. Something fuller was forming. He couldn’t get at it.
It was totally dark now, raindrops pelting the windshield.
Lyle perked up. “What did the attendant say when you called the hotel?” he asked Eleanor. It took her a moment to orient to the question. Then she answered: “She just said she was connecting me to room 106.”
“Isn’t that an odd answer?” Lyle said.
“Why?”
“Because they don’t give out room numbers,” Jerry advanced.
“Exactly,” Lyle said.
They let this tiny clue sink in.
“So what?” Jerry asked. He wasn’t being an ass, just asking the legitimate follow-up question.
“Is she setting a trap? She wants us to go there,” Eleanor said. Then she laughed. “Listen to me. This is nuts.”
Lyle thought this over.
“Lyle,” Eleanor said after a minute, “you still with us?”
“I’ll get the food,” Lyle said. “Least I can do.” He took their orders and went inside while Jerry and Eleanor waited in the car. Inside, Lyle placed his order and thought about this clue about the room number. It was the first time he thought he might have a handle on what this disease called Jackie might be doing, and a plan took shape.
When he got back, Eleanor was stretching her legs. With Jerry out of earshot, she put a gentle hand on Lyle’s arm.
“Thank you.”
“I whipped you up a gourmet dinner,” he said, handing her fast food.
“Hey, you two, get a goddamned room,” Jerry said.