"Cecily," said the soldier's voice. "Your fever is falling. You're going to make it."
She opened her eyes. Her head still hurt. The light in the room was dim. It was night. The soldier was sitting beside her. It wasn't Reuben after all. It was Cole. And behind him stood Mingo.
"Cole," she said. "Mingo."
"Thank God," said Cole.
"She knows us again," said Mingo. "That's a good sign."
"She's going to be fine," said Cole.
I'm never going to be fine again, she wanted to say. I'm just going to be alive, going through the motions, doing my duty. But I will never, never, never be fine.
"Which of you was yelling at me?" she asked.
They looked at each other. "When?" asked Cole.
"While I was sick," she said. "I thought one of you must have—it was a soldier—I thought it was Reuben but it must have been one of you."
"I don't know," said Cole. "We were watching over you in shifts. Well, I came to it late because I had troubles of my own. We're all still walking around like old men, shuffling. It's a slow recovery. But we took turns watching you because—it was our assignment."
"Assignment?" she asked.
"From Rube," said Mingo. "Long before he died. A pact."
"Plus we all care about you for your own sake," said Cole. "And for the children back home."
"Mark's dead, isn't he?" she asked through parched lips.
"He is, Cecily," said Cole. "I'm so sorry."
"I knew he was. But I had such strange dreams. I thought maybe."
"It wasn't a dream. He was really your son, and he finished the job the rest of us tried to do—keeping everybody safe. I'm sorry we couldn't save him. It's hardest on Benny and Arty, because they were there, so weak and feverish they couldn't do anything to help him. But nothing like what you've lost. Nothing. I'm sorry. I'm talking too much. But you had us so scared."
"Why," she murmured.
"Well, besides the matter of your dying? You bled, Cecily. Out of your eyes and nose. It was a death sentence, and we couldn't bear it. When you started bleeding, all the caregivers who weren't too sick to join us prayed for you. It was all we could do."
"And someone yelled at me," said Cecily.
Then she fell back to sleep.
Each time she woke the headache was a little less. She began to eat again. They took her off the IV. They removed her from her room in the hospital and put her in the Mirage hotel, where the rooms were full of recovering caregivers. The government was paying the bill for them, she was told, and all the employees in the hotel were nictovirus survivors, so everyone was immune. The recovering caregivers were treated like royalty by the Nigerian staff.
No, the Deltaland staff, she was told. Nigeria was now a country to the north, a drier place, a Muslim country that spoke another language and had nothing to do with them.
Gradually she began to take notice of the world again. Someone brought her a summary of all that had happened while she was sick. The relatively peaceful division of Nigeria into lands with borders that finally made sense. The short, savage war with Sudan which ended with the dissolution of that country, though how the country would be divided was still being negotiated.
The nictovirus had now spread throughout sub-Saharan Africa. It was like a fire that burned slowly where the population was more sparse, so it seemed to slow, perhaps to stop, then flare up when it reached dense population again. Wherever it went, there were massive efforts to educate people in how to cope with it, what treatments worked. Medicines were made available free of charge and in such quantities that there was no incentive to blackmarket them.
And still President Torrent's quarantine held. And still thousands of American volunteers took their life into their hands and came to Africa, to every country that would allow them in. What Cecily had helped start in Nigeria was now happening in Rwanda and Kenya and Liberia and Senegal and, last of all, in South Africa, though there the volunteers were English and Dutch, and in other countries they were French, Portuguese, Brazilian.
For wherever there was a reasonable hope that their language could be understood, people from outside the quarantine zone volunteered. Most of them were Christians, and many of them were new-fledged, people who had once been cynical, Catholic or Protestant in name only. But the nictovirus and the dangerous work of nursing those sick with it had, oddly enough, rekindled faith that had long been reported as dead. Christianity was a credible religion again in countries that had once stopped caring.
Cecily talked about that with Drew, when he came to visit her. "Is it possible that God sent this terrible disease so that Christianity would matter again?" she asked.
"Anything's possible," he answered, "but personally I don't think so."
"Why not?"
"Because God doesn't need to send plagues. They just come, naturally, like earthquakes and lightning and drought and asteroids that fall onto the Earth and blow it to smithereens and wipe out most of life. God doesn't have to make up disasters, they're part of life. What he cares about is how we respond. Sometimes we're pretty bad. Sometimes we're the disaster ourselves. But sometimes we do okay. Like this time. Like the way some people heard the call and came."
"I didn't hear any call," said Cecily.
"Oh, Cecily, you did hear a call, and don't you forget it. What difference does it make if it was Mark's voice you heard, or God? But your boy brought you here and you did a mighty work because of him."
She cried again then. She cried most days. Sometimes many times a day. But it was different now. She cried for Mark, but she wasn't crying in despair, she was crying out of love and grief. This was familiar territory now. It was like her tears for Reuben. It didn't mean her life was over. She no longer wished to die.
Then one day Babe and Arty came to her with the news that the first person had been cleared to go back to the United States. "That radio dude," said Arty. "Bastard ran around without a mask and he never caught it. He just cleared his three-week quarantine and he's going home. But that opens the door for those of us who are now immune."
"You're going home?" asked Cecily.
"We have formally requested to be assigned to train soldiers in the use of the Noodle and Bones," said Babe. "Since we've had real combat experience with them, and nobody else in the military has, it's not like we've got a lot of competition for the job. And since the equipment has proven itself to be worth the cost, they're going to need a lot of training."
"Well, that's good."
"You sound a little disappointed," said Arty.
"Well, I've been spoiled, and so have the children. Having you all in the D.C. area, you know."
"Oh, well, not to worry, Cecily," said Drew. "Old King Cole talked to his buddy, His Imperial Majesty the President, and we're going to do all our training out of bases in the D.C. area. Specifically because, as he put it to old Averell, if he tried to do it anywhere outside of easy visiting distance to you and your family, we'd all resign our commissions then and nobody'd get the benefit of our experience."
"I bet he didn't say it quite that way."
"We were all in the room listening to the conversation," said Arty. "On speakerphone, so the dude would know we all meant it."
"Well, you're very kind. The children will be glad." And then, once again, she burst into tears. "I'm so tired of crying. I'm emotional all the time."
The paperwork started. She was strong enough now to walk around, to talk to other caregivers. The first wave of them were pretty evenly divided between those who were going to stay and continue nursing the sick, now that they were immune, and those who were going to go back to America, having done their service.
And, of course, there were the thirteen percent who wouldn't be doing either, because the nictovirus had killed them. As it had killed fifteen percent of the soldiers.
It was Cole who brought her the news that her travel orders and permits had come through. "The President wants to see you, he says, but only when you feel up
to it, and he doesn't expect you to resume your duties until you feel strong enough. And Cecily, he says—and I think he means it—that if you choose not to return to work, he'll not only understand, he'll make sure that your income will continue regardless."
"That's not right, not with taxpayer dollars," said Cecily. "I was overpaid as it was."
"It won't be taxpayer dollars. He knows you well enough for that. He talked to some businessman friends. Told them your story. What you used to do for him. How you got things working here. He says about a dozen of them are fighting to have you on permanent retainer, as a consultant, whether you come in and actually consult with them or not."
"Charity money," said Cecily with a little bitterness.
"Right," said Cole. "And if the families of sick people here had refused to let you nurse them because it was 'charity nursing,' would that have been stupid?"
"We'll see," said Cecily.
"I'm going back, too," said Cole. "I'm back to being Colonel Coleman again. The stars disappeared with the job."
"Who's doing it now?"
"Nobody. Torrent got what he wanted, he's had his war, he now has control over African borders."
"What do you mean by that?" asked Cecily.
"I've been around the other guys too much," said Cole. "Talking like they do. I mean, Torrent needed us to help deal with the first, ugly, panicked responses to the nictovirus and the quarantine. Like the attempted genocide by the Hausa, the anarchy in the CAR, taking down a few brutal regimes. By the time we got sick, our job was done and some others were stepping up to the plate. South Africa got rid of the sick government in Zimbabwe. Actually, quite a few presidents-for-life were arrested. Or tried to flee their countries and live on stolen billions in Swiss bank accounts, only to find that all the money in the world couldn't get you out of Africa. It's been a good change. It's not democracy everywhere, but responsible government is actually on the rise, and graft is way down."
"That's good news, but what do you mean about talking like the other guys do? It sounded like you were saying President Torrent engineered all this."
"Look, it's the things he's written over the years. While we've been cooling our heels here we've had good internet access, and they've been showing me all kinds of speeches he made back when he was a professor, but also stuff he's said here and there since he was NSA and even as President. He's actually kind of obsessive about the need for America to become an empire. A benign one, but an empire all the same. To create a worldwide Pax Americana."
"I know about that. It's never been a secret," said Cecily. "Reuben talked to me about that back when he was getting his doctorate and Averell was one of his professors."
"Yes, but it's one thing for him to theorize, and another thing for him to put the whole thing into play."
"He didn't cause the plague."
"Of course not," said Cole. "But he's used the plague. What he's doing in Africa? It's like everybody's been working from his script. Did you know that in 1997 he wrote a paper on boundaries in Africa? How they needed to be redrawn to fit with languages and tribes?"
"A lot of people have been saying that for years."
"But he actually drew the lines. And then he ended it by saying that it couldn't happen until some kind of crisis broke down the old colonial system. Broke the back of the crime lords running all these countries and profiting from them as they were. He specifically said that an epidemic in Africa might be the broom that would sweep clean. Because it would hit every country instead of just a few, the way other disasters and crises do."
Cecily had to think about that for a moment. "All it means is that he was right. And it was a good thing that when the crisis came, a man who had already thought it through was President and happened to have the boldness to act."
"Exactly what I tell them. Told them. And it always comes back to the same thing. The handheld EMP device."
"What does that have to do with it?"
Cole sighed. "They had it in the CAR. And those Sudanese had the exact same model."
"Maybe it was Sudanese testing it in the CAR," said Cecily.
"Do you really think the deep scientific tradition in Sudan developed a handheld electronic interference device?"
Cecily chuckled. "Okay, so they got it from somewhere else."
"But where, where, where was that?" asked Cole. "I'll tell you. I think it was Aldo Verus."
"Well, then, it was not President Torrent."
"Not so fast," said Cole.
"Because Aldo Verus is in jail?"
"Partly. And because Aldo Verus did not get into the business of developing high-tech weapons on the sly until he attended a symposium for responsible leaders of industry—which in that context meant politically-correct billionaires—at which Torrent gave a really interesting presentation in which he said that as long as national governments had a monopoly on weapons development, the best weapons would always be in the hands of the kind of people who chose the military as a career."
"Ah," said Cecily. "I wonder what he meant by that."
"I'm sure you're wondering. But Aldo Verus knew exactly what it meant. I'm betting that's when he started hiring people to develop his little toys. And because he's a wacko, it all looked like it came out of the CGI department of sci-fi movies. But the point is, Torrent went to the people who could make it happen, and he said the words that needed to be said, and then it happened."
"But that was years ago," said Cecily. "You say it like it's a conspiracy, when it's really just a very smart man full of ideas, who has always talked a lot."
"Or planted seeds, depending on how you look at it," said Cole. "But it's not me talking. Pretend you're hearing this from Drew, which is in fact where most of the talk comes from, because he's the one actually doing the research."
"You and I had our suspicions, too," said Cecily. "Remember? Right after the civil war. We thought it looked awfully convenient that everything had somehow worked so that Torrent went from Princeton to NSA to vice president to president in, what, five months?"
"Yes, and whatever happened to our suspicions?"
"I translated all of Reuben's papers and I never found—or, rather, he never found a smoking gun."
"That's what Mingo says. No smoking gun, because Torrent is too smart for there to ever be a gun that was held in his hand. But he is always prepared to step in and take advantage of the situations that come up. And they always come up. And when they do come up, he seems always to have a connection, deep in the background, with the source of the problem."
"Torrent always says that only fools make plans, and really complicated, longterm plans come from madmen."
"He doesn't plan," said Cole. "Any more than a spider plans. He just lays a web out there and waits for something to hit it, and then he pounces and makes it his own."
"Nothing you're saying sounds evil to me," said Cecily. "I know this man. So do you. And he's been a good president. Not conservative enough for Rusty Humphries, of course, but then, neither am I."
"And there you are," said Cole. "You come to the same place where I am. The evidence shows a really smart, bold, ambitious, opportunistic guy who is president now and deserves to be. But my jeesh—Reuben's jeesh—they go beyond the evidence. They aren't lawyers, they're soldiers. They make battlefield judgments. On the battlefield you never have enough information, not even with drones and satellites watching over you, because you can never know the enemy's intentions. And yet you still have to make decisions. So you learn to make guesses. Flying leaps. Reuben was brilliant at it. If he'd lived long enough, he would have been a four-star for real, not a temp like me, and he would have been brilliant at it, because he had good instincts, he could leap to a decision based on fragments of information, and he'd be right."
"Not always at home."
"Because at home it wasn't a battlefield, and you were the five-star there. He was outranked and outclassed."
"Never," said Cecily.
"A joke," said Cole. "B
ut that's how these guys talk about you. That's why they want you on their side. You'll see. When we're all back in the States, they'll come to you."
"What side are we talking about?"
"Call it 'Torrent skeptics,' maybe. Here's the way they lay it out. We get the Noodles and Bones and the first time we deploy it, there's the handheld EMP waiting for us. What was that developed to counter, if not the Noodles and Bones?"
"It hits all electronics, doesn't it?"
"Noodles and Bones are like those jets that can't fly without computers constantly controlling the trim of the aircraft. Without the software, they're nothing. There's no manual override except to take off the Bones entirely. No, they're right, the handheld EMP is too weak to use against anything heavily armored or far away. It's a close-combat defensive weapon, and the only thing it hurts is a weapons system that did not exist, at least in this form, until now."
Cecily thought about that. "Are you saying that you think Torrent tipped somebody off? Because the exoskeleton concept has been around for a while."
"And so has the EMP device. It could all be coincidence. That's Torrent's cover—remember, this is the guys talking, not me. Here's another. Those six trucks from Sudan had to have been equipped and trained especially for this mission. They came into Calabar knowing exactly where they were going. Right down to which building to head for."
"So they were competent."
"So they were tipped off—the guys say. Because the training for that mission had to have begun before anybody outside the highest circles of the military knew that the nictovirus had penetrated our base."
"Which, as I recall, was the guys' clever idea."
"Torrent is in the loop. He finds out that some of us are sick, and he gets my estimate that the whole base will be sick, and at the same time. He has your schedule of the progress of the disease. He knows that there is going to be a window of about a week when we will be useless as a military force. He also knows that there are these Christian do-gooders all over the place."