Outcome (7 page)

"What now?" Chip said.

"This," she said, typing.

"You're going to Google my daughter back to safety?"

"Except for the part where I use Google."

"What am I supposed to do?"

Ellie craned her head around, eyes narrowed. "Try getting some sleep. You look like an extra from
Dawn of the Dead.
If Dee saw you right now, she'd run all the way to Pennsylvania."

Chip went to the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face, which made him feel slightly more human, then remembered the virus and took a proper shower instead, soaping himself down twice. After, he dressed and lay down above the comforter, meaning to put together a plan of his own—to start calling all the hospitals, to call her phone until someone relented and answered it, to staple up posters in the parks, anything—but fell asleep within two minutes.

The door closing woke him at half past five. He sat up hard, puzzled by the strange slant of streetlights through an unfamiliar window, by the silhouette of what could only be Ellie creeping across the room, and then it all came rushing back.

"Sorry," she said. "I don't know why they can't invent a hotel door that's not as loud as a grenade."

His head hurt. "Have you found Dee?"

Ellie's gaze drifted toward the window. Her eyes were sleepy, as bright as cracked glass. "I've been locked out of my networks. The people I know either skipped town or have decided, quite wisely, to quit helping me."

He rubbed his face. His whole body felt angry to be awake. "Guess I'll start calling hospitals."

"Won't work."

"You've got a better idea?"

"Better? Dunno. But results-based? Definitely." She scrunched up her face. "We need to go back to the source. Go into the subway, pretend to be sick, and see where they want to take us."

7

He frowned at her from the bed. "And then what? Break out the grappling hooks and bust out the window?"

Ellie moved to switch on the light, then thought better of it. "That's the fastest way I know to find her."

"How about we wait for them to take somebody
else
who's sick?"

"That could work." She felt herself flushing. The fix was so simple, so much better, she couldn't believe she hadn't thought of it herself.

She must be too tired. While Chip slept, she'd gone out to a coffee shop down past Penn Station to try all her logins without tying them to the hotel's IP address. All her efforts had failed. She'd been blocked from the DAA networks. Either they knew about Mason or they thought she was up to something very sinister. Like alerting the news.

Data-blind, she had resolved to quit wasting time and give her subconscious the chance to kick back a solution to the Dee Problem while she employed her conscious mind in the less-than-enthralling business of renting a car that didn't have a government GPS hidden inside it. She hated these little errands. Grocery shopping. Reupping her birth control. Within the DAA, her trip details had generally been seen to by a young man named Klein who bristled at being called a secretary or even a personal assistant but essentially functioned as one—Ellie's own time being too valuable to waste on travel arrangements. So she was somewhat shocked to discover that even in New York, car rental agencies closed their doors around the same time of night that she had, in her youth here with Chip, often realized she was too drunk to go get dinner and should probably order in Chinese instead.

She wound up riding the A all the way to JFK, a trip that took a good 100 minutes. Plenty of time to work the Dee Problem over again from another angle. This angle being that they'd detained Chip in a rundown Harlem hospital. Not exactly an Atlanta clean room. If Dee weren't sick when they picked her up, but she were being held in a place like that, as time went on, the inevitability of her infection approached 100%. Presumably they were employing some precautions and protocols, extending that timeline, fuzzing its edges, but she would pin the number between 0-5 days. After that, she assumed she would have to detach Chip from the city by force.

She rented the car under her false FBI identity and drove back to the hotel. Halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge, with Manhattan's lights shining on the black river, she had her idea about letting themselves be captured. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but the time just then had been 3:49 AM.

"They might be looking out for me," she said, almost to herself. She glanced at the flimsy hotel clock-radio. It wasn't quite 4:30. "Do you have scissors? A hand mirror? Hair dye?"

Chip wrinkled his forehead. "Scissors, yeah. But they're good for bandages, not hair."

"I'm going to the Duane Reade. I need to switch my look."

"What about the subway?"

"We need to wait for the morning crowds," she said. "Be right back."

"Hey." He gestured to her earbud. "You heard anything from the apartment? Anyone come in?"

"No," she said. She didn't expect to. The button she'd placed was a bug, but she didn't have the receiver. Just an old earbud, worn for Chip's sake.

She left the room and headed to the lobby. Dawn wouldn't break for another couple hours. A young man slouched down the street, eyeing her drunkenly. He doubled over with a cough. She swerved across the street. At a Walgreens, she got scissors, foil, a naturalish red dye, and $200 from the ATM. Back in the hotel, Chip glanced away from the window he'd been watching the street from, eyes puffy. She hacked her hair from shoulder-length to just below her jawline, layered in the dye, sat in a chair to wait for it to set, and promptly fell asleep.

The smell of coffee woke her. Sunlight diffused through the window. She jolted up, checking the clock; only a few minutes too long. Chip grinned and handed her a cup.

"Milk, no sugar," he said.

She nodded groggily and headed to the bathroom to wash out the dye. It was a sloppy job, and their surgical masks were going to draw looks, but it was better than nothing. Chip sat by the window, ceaselessly sipping from his white hotel mug. Aided by the twin virtues of coffee and sleep, he looked back to his normal, stolid self. Over their years together, his placid unflappability had ground her nerves down to nubs—more than once, she'd wanted to slap him, to scream at him to just get mad already—but today, it would be an asset.

After short internal deliberations, she brought her FBI badge and her pistol.

"Bring your kit," she told Chip.

At last, he set down his coffee. "I planned to."

It was a little after eight o'clock and she had to circle Astor Place twice before finding a spot to park in the lot on the south end of the plaza. She sat there for several minutes, watching the pedestrians and the traffic, scanning the curbs for white vans or the black Suburbans with heavy tinting the other divisions loved so much.

"You seeing this?" Chip said from the passenger seat.

"What?"

He pointed his thick finger at the sidewalk, where a woman in a long black coat coiled down to the ground, springlike, shoulders bouncing as she coughed into both hands. The woman blinked back spasm-induced tears, then froze, gaze locked on her cupped palms. She screamed.

Pedestrians swerved around her, walking fast. Ellie touched the rental car's unfamiliar locks. The car was thick with that plasticky, ersatz new-car smell. She hated it.

"You see any vans?" she said.

Chip shook his head. "I mean, there's that bakery one over there. Plumber across the street. None like the one that got me."

"Time to head downstairs."

She clambered out of the car into the bracing morning and the city smells of exhaust and stagnant water. Down the steps to the 4-5-6, the platform smelled even mustier. It was warm, at least. Almost unnaturally so, like the breath of a sleeping animal. The Astor Place stop was as busy as ever, commuters striding past the bas relief beaver set into the wall, the creature that had made Astor's fortune. Passengers coughed into their hands or tucked their chins. More than a few. Ellie watched in silence. The flu had burst overnight. It was too late to stop it.

But the men with the vans would still be here. Ellie was a student of complexity theory. The offspring of chaos theory, the field remained somewhat obscure, perhaps because Michael Crichton's novel about it was far less popular and good than
Jurassic Park
, the book and then movie that had vaulted chaos into the collective consciousness. Complexity sat somewhere between chaos—the completely unpredictable—and deterministic—the completely predictable. In periods of relative stability, its math was strong enough to predict potential outcomes. At certain critical points when an environment became unstable, however, the system became truly chaotic, its new outcome beyond the realm of prediction.

The flu had reached that point. Its conditions were changing faster than any institution could keep up with. The men in the vans were already obsolete. But they might not know that for days. Wind buffeted the tunnel. A train squeaked to a stop. Passengers disgorged from its doors.

"There," Chip said. She followed his gaze down the platform, appreciating the fact he hadn't pointed. A man in plain clothes walked around a young couple and planted his feet shoulder-width, holding one palm out at waist height. He spoke softly. The couple exchanged glances. The man gestured toward the stairs. After a moment, the couple walked to the staircase, man following them two steps behind.

"Well?" Chip said.

She shook her head. "We don't know how they're segregating the infected. Could be by age. We want to follow a kid."

She wandered to the wall and pretended to examine the subway map set behind a scratched plastic panel. Two more trains came and went. Dressed in their surgical masks, they drew more than one look from the rushing crowds. Ellie wasn't too concerned. There were always freaks on the subway. They'd draw far fewer eyes than the steel drummers and bagpipers just up the line at Union Square.

Another train pulled in, vomiting a new host of commuters. Ellie spotted the man at the same time as Chip. Heavyset, his buzzcut prematurely gray, he walked up behind a woman, probably a nanny, shepherding two young children down the platform. He wore one of the funny little see-through breathers. As he talked with the nanny, the woman shook her head repeatedly, fingers held to the base of her throat. Soon enough, she gathered up the kids and marched up the stairs, trailed by the anonymous official.

Ellie detached from the wall and joined the school of passengers climbing up the stairs. On the sidewalk, the man led the nanny and her charges north away from where Ellie was parked.

"Follow him," she said. "I'll grab the car and pick you up."

Chip gave her a panicked look, composed himself, and nodded. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and hunched along after the unmarked agent. Ellie waited for a break in traffic and jaywalked toward the lot, glancing over her shoulder to keep tabs on Chip. As she got into her car and pulled into traffic, Chip hung a right and disappeared down 10th St.

She accelerated up 3rd Ave and took the same turn. Chip was jogging back toward the corner. She pulled over to let him in.

"Olive-colored van," he said. "Just turned north on 1st."

Ellie lurched forward before he had the door closed. At 2nd Ave, she stopped for the light, which refused to switch to green for half a minute. She crossed the avenue, blew down to 1st, swung left through a yellow light, and accelerated north.

"Do you see him?" Chip said.

"Give me a minute," Ellie said.

"You're gonna get pulled over."

She dodged around a white SUV, then swerved to avoid a cab switching into the same lane. The light at 14th was red. After it switched, an olive-tone van grumbled through the intersection.

She hadn't done much of this stuff, tailing people, but if the van took any notice of her, it didn't show it. It drove north past the park-swaddled apartments at Stuyvesant Town, crossed 23rd St., and entered the VA Hospital complex. Ellie continued past and parked near the corner. She grabbed her compact binoculars from her pack and honed in on the van as it stopped in front of the hospital doors.

The officer led the nanny out the back doors, closed them, then took her to the door, passing her off to a couple of masked officials—officials with the same straightness of spine and eerily crisp posture as the ones up in Harlem. The man then returned to the van and brought the kids up, too.

"They just took the kids inside," she said.

"Do you think Dee's here?"

"Could be. Bellevue's just across the street, too."

"So what do we do?"

She put away her binoculars. "Walk through the front door and ask."

He glanced across the car at her. "That sounds..."

"Risky? It is. Because it's fast. Which is just what we need."

Chip scratched the back of his head, puffing his cheeks with a sigh. "If that's what you think."

"Bring your kit," she said. "My name's Jennifer Brown and I'm with the FBI. You're an EMT attached to me."

"What's my name?" he smiled.

"No one will care." She exited the car into the breezy morning, waited for a couple cars to pass, and jogged across the street. Chip's feet scuffed behind her. At the doorway, the pair of soldiers in street clothes moved to intercept her. She flipped out her badge. They radioed in, got clearance, and ushered Ellie and Chip inside.

The woman behind the counter filed a bundle of papers. Ellie showed her badge again.

"Deanna Billips," she said. "Is she here?"

The woman scooted her chair to her keyboard. "Spell that?"

Ellie did so. The woman typed, paused, typed more. She frowned at her monitor.

"Deanna Billips," she said. "Not here, no."

Ellie stared at the wall past the woman's head. "Can you check elsewhere? This is vital."

"What's going on?"

"We're tracking down possible immunities," Ellie said. "That's as much as I can say."

The woman nodded and pulled away from her computer. "The state of our records is less than ideal. I'll be right back."

She walked through the door at the back of the room behind the counter. Ellie glanced at the front doors.