Lethal Code

EPILOGUE

A Sunday morning in mid-February. Lana glanced at the kitchen clock and called upstairs to Emma, reminding her that they needed to leave in five minutes. After countless funerals and other somber services, they would be driving to D.C. for a joyous celebration at a very special Baptist church.

Emma bounded down the stairs, her National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal already pinned to her blue robe. She and Tanesa had become the nation’s youngest recipients of the honor, awarded in the Oval Office last week. Lana, Ruhi, and Candace had also received the medal, as did Pastor William Sr. and Agent Kalisa Harris posthumously.

When Lana and Emma parked near the big white church with its stately Georgian columns, they saw streams of well-dressed worshippers walking up the stone steps. Greeting them on an easel was a poster-size photograph of the man who had led their Sunday services for more than five decades. Garlanded with flowers, the face of Pastor William Sr. still smiled at each of them.

Emma spotted Tanesa at about the same time as her former caregiver — and now close friend — saw her. They rushed to each other and hugged. Lana didn’t always join Emma for the Sunday service, but she would not have missed this one if she’d had to walk all the way from Kressinger. Her daughter and Tanesa were to be feted for their bravery during the worst crisis in the country’s history.

Lana’s eyes pooled when she saw Tanesa walking for the first time without a limp. Her recovery from the bullet wound to her thigh had been grueling, but then again, she was a gutsy kid. Well-wishers had raised funds for plastic surgery for Tanesa — the scar was five inches long — but she’d refused to accept the help until medical care had been provided to the many others in much greater need.

Lana had postponed cosmetic surgery on her arm for the same reason: The nation was still in a state of triage. And when Candace had apologized for her errant shot, Lana had spoken from the heart, saying, “You saved my life and a whole lot of others. We can leave the small stuff to the doctors.”

The national emergency might not end for quite some time, as Deputy Director Holmes knew all too well. He sat at his desk at the NSA after reviewing a report for the president that summarized the devastation of “Web War I,” as the media had dubbed the catastrophe.

The death count stood at a staggering 1.6 million Americans, more than U.S. losses in all of the country’s previous wars combined — and the number of dead was still climbing. They had been claimed by explosions, fire, train wrecks, airplane crashes, starvation, widespread panic and rioting, accidents of all kinds, and disease. Before Veepox finally burned itself out, the engineered virus alone killed 540,000 people in the Twin Cities and Chicago.

Forest fires in Colorado, New Mexico, northern California, Oregon, and Washington also burned out, but not before incinerating thousands of houses, many in urban areas. Denver, Colorado Springs, Taos, Eureka, Eugene, Portland, and Spokane were among the cities where large numbers of homes and business turned into cinders. But no area suffered as horribly as Atlanta. The pipeline explosion there burned down half of the Big Peach before the blaze was finally quelled, making Sherman’s efforts appear paltry by comparison.

In Phoenix, the meltdown of the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station claimed ninety thousand lives. Almost a quarter of them perished during the chaotic and violent flight from the Valley of the Sun as vehicles tore across the desert desperately trying to outrun the radiation. The terror led to shocking slaughter in ring upon ring of suburbs as residents — including heavily armed street gangs — battled furiously over scarce food, water, and gasoline. Then the melting core quietly claimed a much greater toll. The entire region had become America’s Chernobyl. People were still blistered and dying from radiation sickness, nudging the numbers upward.

Holmes was to present the report to the president tomorrow morning. He’d be joined by the director of the CIA. Holmes’s colleagues in Langley had done their damnedest to recruit Ruhi Mancur for the agency, but the Saudi-born hero would have none of it. He was back at NRDC, which had its hands full trying to keep an environmental agenda alive at a time when immediate survival trumped the nation’s long-term health, in the view of Washington officialdom.

Holmes privately cheered Ruhi’s decision to stay at NRDC. He didn’t think any family should have to pony up more than one agent, and Candace Anders had surely proved that she could carry that load for the new Mancur-Anders clan. They had married last month, and in a private moment at the reception Candace confided to him that they planned to have children soon.

And who knew, maybe by staying with NRDC Ruhi could find a way to shut down the coal companies that had made such a mess with their mountaintop removal. A day didn’t go by when Holmes didn’t recall the horror of that sludge pond breaking loose far below him — or his feelings of helplessness as hundreds of houses and thousands of lives were swept away.

Holmes also made a point every day of reading a quotation engraved in marble that he’d placed on his desk a few weeks after the attacks. The lines were from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: “All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”

Grief and ashes. The country had endured more than its share of both. Holmes was determined to never let that happen again, and he’d been putting in seven-day weeks to try to make certain that the nation’s defense was rebuilt as soon as possible. For too many years the most critical first step of fully funding a cybercorps had been thwarted by White House and Capitol Hill indifference. That task had finally been accomplished — in the grimmest possible way — by a renegade North Korean in a hole in the ground in one of the poorest nations on earth.

In the end, Holmes considered that the most telling message of all.

But right now he put aside his official duties to race over to the District. A couple of young heroes were to be honored in a church service, and that pleased him greatly. It also gave him immeasurable faith in the country’s future when he thought of what those young women had done in New Jersey. “Can America Bounce Back?” a national news program had asked last week. How could it not? Holmes thought, with young people like Tanesa Weir and Emma Elkins coming of age.