Darwin's Children

  He had never told anyone that his approach to Mrs. Rhine in that motel room in Bend had had less to do with courage than with a reckless indifference. Back then, he simply had not cared whether he lived or died. His entire world had been turned upside down, and everything he thought he knew had been subjected to a harsh and unmerciful glare.

  Mrs. Rhine was special to him because they had both been through hell.

  “Suit up,” Freedman said. They took off their clothes in separate stalls and hung them in lockers. Small video screens mounted beside the multiple shower heads in each stall reminded them where and how to scrub.

  Freedman helped Dicken pull his undergarment over his stiff leg. Together, they tugged on thick plastic gloves, then slipped their hands into the mitts of the pickle-green suits. This left them with all the manual dexterity of fur seals. Fingerless suits were tougher, more secure, and cheaper, and nobody expected visitors to the inner station to do delicate lab work. Small plastic hooks on the thumb side of each glove allowed them to pull up the other's rear zipper, then strip away a plastic cover on the inner side of a sticky seam. A special pinching tool pressed the seam over the zipper.

  This took twenty minutes.

  They walked through a second set of showers, then through another airlock. Confined within the almost airless hood, Dicken felt perspiration bead his face and slide down his underarms. Beyond the second airlock, each hooked the other to their umbilicals—the familiar plastic hoses suspended on clanking steel hooks from an overhead track.

  Their suits plumped with pressure. The flow of fresh cool air revived him.

  The last time, at the end of his visit, Dicken had emerged from his suit with a nosebleed. Freedman had saved him from weeks of quarantine by diagnosing and stanching the bleeding herself.

  “You're good for the inner,” the orderly told them through a bulkhead speaker.

  The last hatch slid open with a silky whisper. Dicken walked ahead of Freedman into the inner station. In sync, they turned to the right and waited for the steel window blinds to ratchet up.

  The few incidents of Shiver had started at least a hundred crash courses in medical and weapons-related research. If abused women, and women given xenotransplants, could all by themselves design and express thousands of killer plagues, what could a generation of virus children do?

  Dicken clenched his jaw, wondering how much Carla Rhine had changed in sixth months.

  Something of a saint, poor dear.

  3

  Office of Special Reconnaissance

  LEESBURG, VIRGINIA

  Mark Augustine walked with a cane down a long underground tunnel, following a muscular red-headed woman in her late thirties. Big steam pipes lined the tunnel on both sides and the air in the tunnel was warm. Conduits of fiber optic cables and wires were bundled and cradled in long steel trays slung from the concrete ceiling, and away from the pipes.

  The woman wore a dark green silk suit with a red scarf and running shoes, gray with outdoor use. Augustine's hard-soled Oxfords scuffed and tapped as he trailed several steps behind, sweating. The woman showed no consideration for his slower pace.

  “Why am I here, Rachel?” he asked. “I'm tired. I've been traveling. There's work to do.”

  “Something's developing, Mark. I'm sure you'll love it,” Browning called back over her shoulder. “We've finally located a long-lost colleague.”

  “Who?”

  “Kaye Lang,” Browning replied.

  Augustine grimaced. He sometimes pictured himself as a toothless old tiger in a government filled with vipers. He was perilously close to becoming a figurehead, or worse, a clown over a drop tank. His only remaining survival tactic was a passive appearance of being outpaced by young and vicious career bureaucrats attracted to Washington by the smell of incipient tyranny.

  The cane helped. He had broken his leg in a fall in the shower last year. If they thought he was weak and stupid, that gave him an advantage.

  The maximum depth of Washington's soulless vacancy was the proud personal record of Rachel Browning. A specialist in law enforcement data management, married to a telecom executive in Connecticut whom she rarely saw, Browning had begun as Augustine's assistant in EMAC—Emergency Action—seven years ago, had moved into foreign corporate interdiction at the National Security Agency and had finally jumped aisle again to head the intelligence and enforcement branch of EMAC. She had started the Special Reconnaissance Office—SRO—which specialized in tracking dissidents and subversives and infiltrating radical parent groups. SRO shared its satellites and other equipment with the National Reconnaissance Office.

  Once upon a time, in a different lifetime, Browning had been very useful to him.

  “Kaye Lang Rafelson is not someone you just lure and bust,” Augustine said. “Her daughter is not just another notch on the handle of our butterfly net. We have to be very careful with all of them.”

  Browning rolled her eyes. “She's not off limits according to any directive I've received. I certainly do not regard her as a sacred cow. It's been seven years since she was on Oprah.”

  “If you ever feel the need to learn political science, much less public relations, I know of some excellent undergraduate courses at City College,” Augustine said.

  Browning smiled her patent leather smile once again, bulletproof, certainly proof against a toothless tiger.

  They arrived at the elevator together. The door opened. A Marine with a holstered nine millimeter greeted them with hard gray eyes.

  Two minutes later, they stood in a small private office. Four plasma displays like a Japanese screen rose on steel stands beyond the central desk. The walls were bare and beige, insulated with close-packed, sound-absorbing foam panels.

  Augustine hated enclosed spaces. He had come to hate everything he had accomplished in the last eleven years. His entire life was an enclosed space.

  Browning took the only seat and laid her hands over a keyboard and trackball. Her fingers danced over the keyboard, and she palmed the trackball, sucking on her teeth as she watched the monitor. “They're living about a hundred miles south of here,” she murmured, focusing on her task.

  “I know,” Augustine said. “Spotsylvania County.”

  She looked up, startled, then cocked her head to one side. “How long have you known?”

  “A year and a half,” Augustine said.

  “Why not just take them? Soft heart, or soft brain?”

  Augustine dismissed that with a blink revealing neither opinion nor passion. He felt his face tighten. Soon his cheeks would begin to hurt like hell, a residual effect from the blast in the basement of the White House, the bomb that had killed the president, nearly killed Augustine, and taken the eye of Christopher Dicken. “I don't see anything.”

  “The network is still assembling,” Browning said. “Takes a few minutes. Little Bird is talking to Deep Eye.”

  “Lovely toys,” he commented.

  “They were your idea.”

  “I've just come back from Riverside, Rachel.”

  “Oh. How was it?”

  “Awful beyond belief.”

  “No doubt.” Browning removed a Kleenex from her small black purse and delicately blew her nose, one nostril at a time. “You sound like someone who wants to be relieved of command.”

  “You'll be the first to know, I'm sure,” Augustine said.

  Rachel pointed to the monitor, snapped her fingers, and like magic, a picture formed. “Deep Eye,” she said, and they looked down upon a small patch of Virginia countryside flocked with thick green trees and pierced by a winding, two-lane road. Deep Eye's lens zoomed in to show the roof of a house, a driveway with a single small truck, a large backyard surrounded by tall oaks.

  “And . . . here's Little Bird,” Browning's voice turned husky with an almost erotic approval.

  The view switched to that of a drone swooping up beside the house like a dragonfly. It hovered near a small frame window, then adjusted exposure in the morning brightne
ss to reveal the head and shoulders of a young girl, rubbing her face with a washcloth.

  “Recognize her?” Browning asked.

  “The last picture we have is from four years ago,” Augustine said.

  “That must be from an inexcusable lack of trying.”

  “You're right,” Augustine admitted.

  The girl left the bathroom and vanished from view. Little Bird rose to hover at an altitude of fifty feet and waited for instructions from the unseen pilot, probably in the back of a remoter truck a few miles from the house.

  “I think that's Stella Nova Rafelson,” Browning mused, tapping her lower lip with a long red fingernail.

  “Congratulations. You're a voyeur,” Augustine said.

  “I prefer ‘paparazzo.’ ”

  The view on the screen veered and dropped to take in a slender female figure stepping off the front porch and onto the scattered gravel walkway. She was carrying something small and square in one hand.

  “Definitely our girl,” Browning said. “Tall for her age, isn't she?”

  Stella walked with rigid determination toward the gate in the wire fence. Little Eye dropped and magnified to a three-quarter view. The resolution was remarkable. The girl paused at the gate, swung it halfway open, then glanced over her shoulder with a frown and a flash of freckles.

  Dark freckles, Augustine thought. She's nervous.

  “What is she up to?” Browning asked. “Looks like she's going for a walk. And not to school, I'm thinking.”

  Augustine watched the girl amble along the dirt path beside the old asphalt road, out in the country, as if taking a morning stroll.

  “Things are moving kind of fast,” Browning said. “We don't have anyone on site. I don't want to lose the opportunity, so I've alerted a stringer.”

  “You mean a bounty hunter. That's not wise.”

  Browning did not react.

  “I do not want this, Rachel,” Augustine said. “It's the wrong time for this kind of publicity, and certainly for these tactics.”

  “It's not your choice, Mark,” Browning said. “I've been told to bring her in, and her parents as well.”

  “By whom?” Augustine knew that his authority had been sliding of late, perhaps drastically since Riverside. But he had never imagined that Riverside would lead to an even more severe crackdown.

  “It's a sort of test,” Browning said.

  The secretary of Health and Human Services shared authority over EMAC with the president. Forces within EMAC wanted to change that and remove HHS from the loop entirely, consolidating their power. Augustine had tried the same thing himself, years ago, in a different job.

  Browning took control from the remoter truck and sent Little Bird down the road, buzzing quietly a discreet distance behind Stella Nova Rafelson. “Don't you think Kaye Lang should have kept her maiden name when she married?”

  “They never married,” Augustine said.

  “Well, well. The little bastard.”

  “Fuck you, Rachel,” Augustine said.

  Browning looked up. Her face hardened. “And fuck you, Mark, for making me do your job.”

  4

  MARYLAND

  Mrs. Rhine stood in her living room, peering through the thick acrylic pane as if searching for the ghosts of another life. In her late thirties, she was of medium height, with stocky arms and legs but a thin torso, chin strong and pointed. She wore a bright yellow dress and a white blouse with a patchwork vest she had made herself. What they could see of her face between gauze bandages was red and puffy, and her left eye had swollen shut.

  Her arms and legs were completely covered in Ace bandages. Mrs. Rhine's body was trying to eliminate trillions of new viruses that could craftily claim they were part of her self, from her genome; but the viruses were not making her sick. Her own immune response was the principle cause of her torment.

  Someone, Dicken could not remember who, had likened autoimmune disease to having one's body run by House Republicans. A few years in Washington had eerily reinforced the aptness of this comparison.

  “Christopher?” Mrs. Rhine called out hoarsely.

  The lights in the inner station switched on with a click.

  “It's me,” Dicken answered, his voice sibilant within the hood.

  Mrs. Rhine decorously sidestepped and curtsied, her dress swishing. Dicken saw that she had placed his flowers in a large blue vase, the same vase she had used the last time. “They're beautiful,” she said. “White roses. My favorites. They still have some scent. Are you well?”

  “I am. And you?”

  “Itching is my life, Christopher,” she said. “I'm reading Jane Eyre. I think, when they come here to make the movie, down here deep in the Earth, as they will, don't you know, that I will play Mr. Rochester's first wife, poor thing.” Despite the swelling and the bandages, Mrs. Rhine's smile was dazzling. “Would you call it typecasting?”

  “You're more the mousy, inherently lovely type who saves the rugged, half-crazed male from his darker self. You're Jane.”

  She pulled up a folding chair and sat. Her living room was normal enough, with a normal decor—couches, chairs, pictures on the walls, but no carpeting. Mrs. Rhine was allowed to make her own throw rugs. She also knitted and worked on a loom in another room, away from the windows. She was said to have woven a fairy-tale tapestry involving her husband and infant daughter, but she had never shown it to anyone.

  “How long can you stay?” Mrs. Rhine asked.

  “As long as you'll put up with me,” Dicken said.

  “About an hour,” Marian Freedman said.

  “They gave me some very nice tea,” Mrs. Rhine said, her voice losing strength as she looked down at the floor. “It seems to help with my skin. Pity you can't share it with me.”

  “Did you get my package of DVDs?” Dicken asked.

  “I did. I loved Suddenly, Last Summer,” Mrs. Rhine said, voice rising again. “Katharine Hepburn plays mad so well.”

  Freedman gave him a dirty look through their hoods. “Are we on a theme here?”

  “Hush, Marian,” Mrs. Rhine said. “I'm fine.”

  “I know you are, Carla. You're more sane than I am.”

  “That is certainly true,” Mrs. Rhine said. “But then I don't have to worry about me, do I? Honestly, Marian's been good to me. I wish I had known her before. Actually, I wish she'd let me fix her hair.”

  Freedman lifted an eyebrow, leaning in toward the window so Mrs. Rhine could see her expression. “Ha, ha,” she said.

  “They really aren't treating me too badly, and I'm passing all my psychological profiles.” Mrs. Rhine's face dropped some of the overwrought, elfin look it assumed when she engaged in this kind of banter. “Enough about me. How are the children doing, Christopher?”

  Dicken detected the slightest hitch in her voice.

  “They're doing okay,” Dicken said.

  Her tone became brittle. “The ones who would have gone to school with my daughter, had she lived. Are they still kept in camps?”

  “Mostly. Some are hiding out.”

  “What about Kaye Lang?” Mrs. Rhine asked. “I'm especially interested in her and her daughter. I read about them in the magazines. I saw her on the Katie Janeway show. Is she still raising her daughter without the government's help?”

  “As far as I know,” Dicken said. “We haven't kept in touch. She's kind of gone underground.”

  “You were good friends, I read in the magazines.”

  “We were.”

  “You shouldn't lose touch with your friends,” Mrs. Rhine said.

  “I agree,” Dicken said. Freedman listened patiently. She understood Mrs. Rhine with more than clinical thoroughness, and she also understood the two feminine poles of Christopher Dicken's busy but lonely life: Mrs. Rhine, and Kaye Lang, who had first pinpointed and predicted the emergence of SHEVA. Both had touched him deeply.

  “Any news on what they're doing inside me, all those viruses?”

  “We have a lo
t to learn,” Dicken said.

  “You said some of the viruses carry messages. Are they whispering inside me? My pig viruses . . . are they still carrying pig messages?”

  “I don't know, Carla.”

  Mrs. Rhine held out her dress and dropped down in her overstuffed chair, then brushed back her hair with one hand. “Please, Christopher. I killed my family. Understanding what happened is the one thing I need in this life. Tell me, even the little stuff, your guesses, your dreams . . . anything.”

  Freedman nodded. “Good or bad, we tell her all we know,” she said. “It's the least she deserves.”

  In a halting voice, Dicken began to outline what had been learned since his last visit. The science was sharper, progress had been made. He left out the weapons research aspect and focused on the new children.

  They were remarkable and in their own way, remarkably beautiful. And that made them a special problem to those they had been designed to replace.

  5

  SPOTSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA

  “I hear you smell as good as a dog,” the young man in the patched denim jacket said to a tall, slender girl with speckled cheeks. He reverently set a six-pack of Millers on the Formica countertop and slapped down a twenty-dollar bill. “Luckies,” he told the minimart clerk.

  “She doesn't smell good as a dog,” the second male said with a dull smile. “She smells worse.”

  “You guys cut it out,” the clerk warned, putting away the bill and getting his cigarettes. She was rail thin with pale skin and tormented blonde hair. A haze of stale cigarettes hung around her coffee-spotted uniform.

  “We're just talking,” the first male said. He wore his hair in a short ponytail tied with a red rubber band. His companion was younger, taller and stooped, long brown hair topped by a baseball cap.

  “I'm warning you, no trouble!” the clerk said, her voice as rough as an old road. “Honey, you ignore him, he's just fooling.”

  Stella pocketed her change and picked up her bottle of Gatorade. She was wearing shorts and a blue tank top and tennis shoes and no makeup. She gave the two men a silent sniff. Her nostrils dimpled. They were in their mid-twenties, paunchy, with fleshy faces and rough hands. Their jeans were stained by fresh paint and they smelled sour and gamy, like unhappy puppies.