Dead on Arrival

Thirty-Three

The ring woke Lyle at last.

“Dr. Martin?”

“Right.”

“This is the front desk.”

“Okay, got it. What time is it?”

“Eleven fifty. We rang at ten, then knocked and then finally—”

“In the what?”

“What?”

“Morning or night?” It was completely dark in the room, the curtains pulled tight.

“Morning. Are you… are you okay, sir?”

“Yes. Thanks for the call.”

Lyle started to set the phone on the cradle. He pulled it back.

“One more question, young lady.”

“Of course. We’re here to help.”

“Where am I?”

“Steamboat. Springs. The Sheraton. Are you sure…”

Lyle, the phone now nestled between his left shoulder and his chin, had stopped listening. He ran his hands over the undershirt on his chest and down over his hips, feeling for sensation. The woman on the phone had asked something about whether he wanted coffee or orange juice delivered to the room. She sounded worried about him. “Coffee,” he said, and he reached over and set the phone in its cradle.

He closed his eyes and studied his dull headache. Was he sick? Maybe he’d just overslept. Maybe he’d dipped too deep this time into the over-the-counter sleeping medication. His kingdom for the prescription pad back.

Wasn’t he here for a conference? He swung his legs off the side of the bed and fought a wave of nausea. It was brief. He steadied himself. He felt another symptom, a sore of some kind inside his mouth, on his tongue. He ran his finger along its right side and could feel it was raw, like he’d bitten it. He lay there, exploring these odd sensations in his body, exhaustion but it felt like more than that. Less than five minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Lyle stood and pulled open the curtains, which were vertically striped with brown and gray, and immediately regretted it. It wasn’t just light but bright white, new snow white. Now he pictured arriving at the hotel, late at night, or early in the morning, in the cold. He’d gone right to bed. The small room, with quaint accents, spoke to what he figured must be precious real estate here on the edge of the ski mountain.

He opened the door to discover a woman in a smart gray pantsuit. She held a silver coffee tray in her arms but awkwardly so, and she had no name tag. At that moment, Lyle correctly deduced she wasn’t a bellhop or waiter bringing room service. She must be a manager, Lyle thought, from the way she looked past him and into the room.

“I’m fine,” he said, “much better now that I’ve got coffee.”

“On the house,” said the woman. “May I bring it inside?”

“Sure,” he said. Let her knock herself out. Over the last few years, as he’d had more to drink and taken more pills to sleep, he’d grown accustomed to friends and family occasionally peeking in. It was funny, in a way, the way they’d always walk into his studio apartment on Divis and look around as if they were somehow looking around his liver for spots.

She put the tray with the coffee decanter and newspaper on the nightstand beneath a lamp with a wide-brim opaque oval shade. Lyle watched the room through her eyes as she scanned his jeans on the floor, and the suitcase left near the foot of the bed, the bedspread strewn. The woman, trying to look nonchalant, glanced at the darkened mouth of the bathroom.

“Do you need to use it?” Lyle asked.

“No, I—”

“Just kidding. May I ask, do you know which floor the I.D. conference is on?”

“Conference?”

“Sorry, infectious disease.”

She straightened. “I don’t think…” She paused. “We had an orthopedist conference last week, y’know, the guys who help the skiers and their knees, but I don’t think we have anything this week. I could be wrong, or maybe the event is at a different hotel?” She ended it with a kind of question mark, as if she had somehow made a mistake.

Lyle thanked her and watched her go. He looked at his invite, which suggested he had the right place. Had he written down the date wrong or misunderstood it? That wouldn’t be unlike him, he realized. He’d really sunk the last few months. That’s why he’d wanted to come out here and try, at least, to restart. Maybe it just wasn’t to be. How could he have made a mistake like that?

For some reason, each time he reached for an answer, he found himself humming the words from a song. It was Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” which talks of a man losing faith and getting up and finding “a reason to believe.” In the last year, after a beer or two, Lyle would watch the video on YouTube of a concert from Germany where Springsteen had crushed it. Lyle kept the video bookmarked and now, for some reason, he couldn’t get it out of his head.

He looked down at the newspaper, Steamboat Today. The main story had to do with a prediction that El Niño would mean a glorious wet winter for the mountain town. This qualified here for front-page news. At the bottom of the page, a teaser about a shootout in Oregon caught Lyle’s attention. He turned to page 3 to read about this, yet another, tragedy: a group of separatists had killed three federal marshals before being beaten back in a massive gun exchange. Inside the group’s compound, police found a cache of weapons that one official described as “rivaling that of the Portland police force.” There were plans the group had tried to shred, but failed, that showed alliances with groups in two other states, Idaho and Minnesota, partly over grievances with the appointment of federal judges that group professed to dislike.

Lyle closed the paper. Maybe he was better off in retirement; the frickin’ human race.

Twenty-four hours later, Lyle landed back in San Francisco. He felt for the most part bewildered. He also wondered if his use of all those sleeping pills and the recreational booze had truly begun to eat away at his cognition.

Back in his studio apartment, he listened to the sounds of twentysomethings eating barbecue on the patio across the street and vowed he’d stop drinking for a day or two. He unpacked what little he’d taken. Put the Nebraska album on his old turntable and sat down on a beanbag chair, trying to shake the feeling he’d been put through the spin cycle in a dryer. It would go away in a few hours, he told himself, looking to put the whole damn failed experiment of going to Colorado behind him.

That’s when he found the note in his back pocket.

Thirty-Four

At first, Lyle assumed it must have been something he’d written in an altered state and decided to ignore it. After all, it made no sense. He tossed it in the tin pail he’d gotten at the garage sale where he met the last person he’d slept with. Her name was Papyrus and she was at the garage sale exploring an old fishbowl but, really, it became clear, had stopped while walking by to explore Lyle. Extremely nice, extremely sexual, woman, and young, which is how Lyle thought of anyone in their late twenties. It lasted three nights, until Lyle had, as much as he could through a sexual encounter, exorcized his fury at Melanie.

That was two years ago, give or take, and the garage sale remnant had given him a memento and symbol for his ugly existence. He was throwing his life away, everything he’d believed in or wanted. Every time he looked at that damn thing, he thought of the woman he’d slept with, nice enough for sure, but decidedly not Melanie, and his life decidedly not the one he’d invented and that he’d been driven from—mostly by himself.

Now, he realized, reclining in his aging blue beanbag chair, he again faced a fork in the road, one he felt like he’d already taken. A week ago, he set aside all his reticence and decided, finally, yes, he would attend the infectious disease conference and stick a toe into his former life. For the most part, he had told himself, it was because he needed the money. He couldn’t go on forever on dwindling expenses, even in a studio where the rent didn’t rise because he gave free medical counsel to the older woman who owned the building and lived on the top floor. There was more to his motivation than mere money. Little by little, he’d forgiven Melanie for having a one-night stand that, remarkably enough, produced offspring (or maybe it was more than a one-night stand but that’s what she claimed). And maybe the person he was forgiving was himself for having gotten so withdrawn in the first place that Melanie had wanted to feel some control over her life and lashed out. Maybe he had been sabotaging the whole thing. Could he blame her?

He blamed humanity. Lyle had learned and studied, trained and taught, all in the name of staving off disease and infection. And humans thanked him by killing themselves off. How many patients had he seen who put themselves into perilous positions with their own behavior? Even when it wasn’t his direct charge, he’d wander through the hospital and see the diabetic who had eaten himself into disease, the car wreck victim who had texted herself off the bridge, the gunshot victim who had fired first.

When he got the invite to Steamboat, he at first dismissed it. But the organization, the woman who ran it, stroked his ego and hit the right buttons. Maybe that had been a cruel joke, too. He’d have to go back and investigate and call them, find out if he fucked up the date somehow or they duped him or what. It really was strange. But, regardless, the trip, having failed, usurped by bad planning and a miasma of strange and hazy memories from a distant mountain town, put him in the position of having to get up some gumption again. If he was going to get his ass out of this dwindling situation, he was going to have to make it happen. Where was that energy going to come from?

He fell asleep in the chair and woke up in the middle of the night with a crook in his neck. He ignored it and walked over to the trash bin and pulled from the refuse the crumpled piece of paper. He recognized his own handwriting:

Over and over he read it. He knew it meant something, just knew, and he had no idea what.

He finally got to sleep at four in the morning and dreamed vividly of playing a game of laser tag in the snow. The dreamy sleep left Lyle feeling grateful—it had been a long time since he’d been visited by such rest, without assistance—and his exhaustion lifted. That morning, at the coffee shop around the corner from his house, he turned on his vastly outdated Mac and read the news and then succumbed to curiosity and looked up channelopathy. His research confirmed what little he remembered. Channelopathies are diseases that can lead to brief periods of paralysis and are associated with problems in the ion channels, which are gatekeepers of cells.

Already, he was baffled, partly because he’d exhausted his knowledge on the subject.

He surfed around and reminded himself that an ion is an atom or molecule that is electrically charged, either positively or negatively, depending on the mismatch inside of it between electrons and protons. Ions like sodium and potassium would flow through the openings in the cell, creating tiny but ultimately powerful electrical impulses that stimulate electrical pulses in the body to fire muscles and nerves.

Lyle looked up from his laptop and rubbed his eyes. This was mind-bending stuff, more the bailiwick of physicists than doctors. Around him, he eyed a half-dozen fellow patrons buried in their laptops and phones and then returned to his own.

As he read across various websites, feeling very much vexed, at least one thing did become clear to him: why he’d written seizure next to channelopathy. In fact, these were two very different ideas, but they both did implicate electrical pulses and both could involve temporary paralysis. Both could lead to acute memory loss. In the case of seizure, the electrical storm could complicate or even erase the memory for up to six hours prior to the event.

And neither of them, at least on its face, had anything to do with pandemic.

He did a search for “pandemic” and “channelopathy,” and another using “epidemic” and then matching the various words with “seizure” and came up empty.

He combined the searches with tech, and tech-born, and empty, empty, empty.

What the hell was this note in his pocket?

He stood up to leave and was bumped into by a woman walking with a coffee in her hand and her face looking down at the cell phone in her other hand. She spilled her coffee. “I’m sorry,” she said, without even fully looking up. “No problem,” Lyle said, finding it mostly funny. Ever the clinician, he noticed the swelling red around her nose. She had a cold. It left him with an idea that he didn’t put a fine point on until a step or two later. Absently, he sat again at a bench and fired up his laptop and confirmed what he’d been thinking: channelopathies sometimes involved an autoimmune attack. This idea, autoimmunity, was much more in Lyle’s wheelhouse and he understood better what he was reading. Sometimes, the body’s own defenders would attack the body itself, as in diabetes or arthritis or other autoimmune disorders, and then become more dangerous than any foreign invader.

Lyle had been out of the game a few years and knew that giant leaps were being made in the understanding of the immune system. He knew whom to ask about it, too, but the very idea gave him a stomachache. No way he was going back to Jen Sanchez. She’d had the corner office when he’d had his ignominious fall and, in passing, he knew she’d just kept climbing floors and corner offices. He sensed she’d always scorned him, maybe even conferred with Dean Thomas in their dislike of him, so no way he was going to talk to her. And then he laughed.

Talk to her?

Of course he wasn’t going to talk to her.

Was he really thinking of going on a goose chase? Was he following his medical muse again?

He slammed shut his laptop so vigorously that a college student sitting next to Lyle said, “Easy there, pardner,” as if Lyle had just screeched at his child in public. Lyle laughed again, this time more bitterly. He walked out of the café, backpack over his shoulder, trying to erase the gnawing of his impulses, the weird, persistent Springsteen soundtrack coming in over the top, and to just take in the world. He inhaled the dry-roasted smoked pork from the barbecue place on the corner, across from his studio, and felt a craving he hadn’t felt in months. It wasn’t a good use of money, not now, but, hey, maybe some mysterious pandemic is coming, he smirked to himself, so why not blow the last of the savings on barbecue.

He stood in line with the twentysomethings, listening to them roar about the latest media moment, having to do with this group of separatists in Oregon. After a few of them had been shot, a grassroots movement had started encouraging gun owners to march on Capitol Hill and make a show of The People and their right to defend themselves. A million Americans with automatic weapons, an open-carry bonanza. “A dare,” was how one commentator put it. They were calling it the Million Gun March. Would the government dare to arrest or confiscate or confront tens of thousands of law-abiding citizens? That’s exactly what the government said it would do “and you’re goddamned right,” said one of the techies standing in line for barbecue. “It’s time to put this thing to rest once and for all.” Meaning: the macho gun culture. To which his girlfriend responded: “Government’s thugs, too. I went to the range the other day.”

Amid this intensifying talk-show moment, a minor spectacle erupted when a car without a driver circled the block.

Only of late had these bulbous Google cars started making the rounds in San Francisco. Most of the testing had been done on the roads of Mountain View, the Silicon Valley city Google called home. Now, though, the technology had come far enough that the company branched out. To mild fascination, the car passed the barbecue place and then, to whistles and cheers, executed a perfect U-turn and then an even more perfect parallel parking job. It landed right in front of Lyle’s apartment. The crowd went wild, and then Lyle watched with his own fascination as everyone around him took pictures of the thing and started sending out the image to various social media. So lost was the person in front of Lyle that she didn’t move forward in line and Lyle shrugged and got in front of her.

He stared at the self-driving car. Google, channelopathy, now a self-driving car in front of his house?

He ate his barbecue and returned to his apartment, overcome with malaise.

A week passed this way, one of the strangest that Lyle could remember in his life. He felt that he was in a stupor, an almost clinical heaviness, and that, simultaneously, he was emerging from one, a long, deep emotional slumber. An impulse lingered to scrape away the dead skin that he felt like covered every inch of him. The note he’d now taped to his cheap, white refrigerator symbolized his struggle to molt. He wanted to understand it and yet the idea repelled him.

He lost himself, or tried to, reading about the so-called Million Gun March. This looked like it actually might happen: a million gun owners promising to show their solidarity through a peaceful congregation at the Washington Mall. The news sites and blogs blared and stewed with support and condemnation. Each vitriolic emotion and editorial more kindling, each more marketing. Politicians were being asked to take sides, to back gun owners or the government, as if these were somehow in opposition.

Alternately, maybe analogously, Lyle weighed his own internal conflict. What to do about this mystery? Whether to act? He vacillated, seesawed, up and back, as he read the Internet, walked the line to discovery, retreated, let ideas wash over him. Eventually, he found the e-mail invite asking him to speak in Steamboat at a conference. It was sent by a woman named Jennifer Babcock, the executive director at IDEA, which evidently stood for Infectious Disease Exploration Association. So it said at the end of the e-mail and on the group’s website. Lyle e-mailed Jennifer Babcock and called a number on the website that went to her voice mail. The website gave Lyle pause. It listed membership organizations that weren’t referenced elsewhere on the Internet, and IDEA itself didn’t exist elsewhere on the Internet. Jennifer Babcock described herself in her initial e-mail as a Ph.D. in immunology but he couldn’t find such a person online, either. She signed her e-mails J.B. Lyle gave up, irritated.

He considered calling Melanie, felt a desperation to visit her, looked her up online, and found she had moved to the East Bay, or was working there, anyway, at Alta Bates hospital. He sat on the information, letting it sink in with everything else.

Then, on the seventh day, his phone rang with an unfamiliar number. Bored, irritated with his entropy, he answered.

“Hello,” a woman’s voice said.

“Yes.”

“Um, I’m sorry to bother you.”

“I’m not interested in a time share,” he said randomly and was about to hang up.

“It’s about Steamboat,” the woman said.

Lying there on his bed, he felt piqued enough to rise up on an elbow. He looked for words.

“Are you there?” the woman said.

“Are you the one who invited me to the conference?” Lyle asked. “I’ve been meaning to call. I think we had a miscommunication.”

It’s true, he’d wanted to get in touch but he feared he’d screwed the whole thing up or maybe he knew on some level that something more insidious was going on and he was still weighing whether and how to confront it.

“What? No. I’m not sure how to start this but please don’t hang up.”

A pang of vague, distant recognition struck Lyle, followed by an acute burst of adrenaline. Did he know this woman’s voice?

“I’m listening,” he managed.

“My name is Eleanor Hall. I’m a pilot. I found your phone number in my back pocket, with a note. I think it’s important.”

Thirty-Five

Two hours later, a vivid yellow winter sun fading, Lyle walked down the chipped cement steps in the stairwell of his apartment building. He’d showered, put on a decent shirt and a gray sweater, and combed his hair. To go meet a woman who claimed to be a pilot, whom he couldn’t be sure he’d ever seen, let alone met, and who had a tale to tell as strange and familiar as his own.

They’d picked neutral ground, located between where each lived near Duboce Park. It was a café—known for its coffee and New York–style pizza—that each of them, coincidentally, frequented. When they’d gotten off the phone, Lyle googled Eleanor Hall and found a photo from a corporate website that indicated she was indeed a pilot. Her image gave Lyle the same feeling as her voice, that she was somehow familiar. Light hair and a trusting smile, and, if the photo was relatively recent, a few years younger than Lyle. Attractive. Maybe that was why Lyle combed his hair. But when was the last time he wanted to impress anyone?

At the bottom of the stairwell, he unchained his bike from the small storage area, tightened the leather pedal straps around his sneakers, and took off on Divisidero. He loved riding his bike, the terror of imminent death notwithstanding. San Francisco had one of the highest rates in the state of drivers killing pedestrians and bikers. No wonder, given that this city, as much as any other, mixed a driving culture with a walking one. Lyle rode and kept a keen eye.

He saw the driverless car.

It looked like the very one that had been parked outside of his house when he’d been eating barbecue. Now it crawled along, three cars behind Lyle. An empty driver’s seat and the thing cruising along as if pulled by a puppeteer. These cars were becoming more common but it was still eerie, Lyle thought, and pedaled on. A few blocks later, the car seemed to get stuck in traffic as Lyle climbed up the steep part of Divisidero, right before it transforms into Castro, and took a left onto Waller. The looming California Pacific Hospital stirred a memory of doing a consult for a patient with dengue fever. It had been one of those gratifying moments when Lyle’s contributions, modest though he felt them, saved a nice young man.

The autonomous vehicle crept over Waller and took a left but, this time, Lyle, lost in thought, didn’t see it was continuing in his same direction.

At Duboce Park, Lyle dismounted and watched toddlers and their nannies disgorging for home. The chill had come after a drought-blessed, dry day, the sea breeze picking up and detectable even this far inland if you put your nose to the air. Lyle stopped a few blocks shy of the café to think. This putative pilot had said that she’d found a note in her back pocket with Lyle’s phone number and the words: Call Dr. Lyle Martin about Steamboat. You’re not imagining.

He might well have blown her off, at least initially, had it not been for the phrasing: You’re not imagining. It’s what he had written to himself in his own note.

On the phone, he’d started to ask her what she was imagining and she suggested they meet and she’d elaborate. He was having the same impulse and so that was that. He locked up at a bike stand on the corner and pressed himself to consider what he remembered from the flight to Steamboat. He recalled settling in, downing some Benadryl, maybe a lot of it, falling asleep. As he recounted it, he wasn’t sure that’s what happened.

“Dr. Martin?”

He turned to see a woman looking at him quizzically. She held car keys in her hand and had a newspaper tucked under her arm.

“Lyle,” he said. “Captain Hall?”

She nodded and half smiled. “So we googled each other and we each use honorifics on first reference. Please drop mine too,” she said. “Eleanor.”

He wanted to look away from her, given that it was impolite to stare, but felt like he was having déjà vu. “Like we’ve met,” she said. “Right?”

For a moment, his heart fluttered with fear and uncertainty.

“There’s a table. I’ll grab it.”

They sat beneath a vibrantly colored painting that looked at a distance like the state of Texas smeared by a rainbow. The uncomfortable plastic green chairs matched the yellow and green paint. The pizza slices kept this place in the game, and Lyle and Eleanor each had one, the special, prosciutto and basil. Each had professed to have been here before and Lyle wondered if that’s how he knew her. He tried not to stare. She didn’t touch her pizza, and he tried not to wolf his or pound his beer.

“So you’re a pilot,” he broke the ice.

She nodded like she was still gathering her thoughts and figuring how to express them. The voice of a popular soprano rocker came over the coffeehouse speakers. “I’ve been grounded, temporarily,” Eleanor started and then paused. “Sorry, you’ll have to forgive me; this is a little strange.”

“Grounded?”

“There was a problem with the landing in Steamboat.” She smiled and shook her head. “So I’m told.”

“Sorry, I thought you said you were a—”

“Right, the pilot—on the flight. I was. I just can’t remember much about it. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”

“Wait. I’m right there with you. The flight, I can’t quite grab onto it. Small wonder, though; I slept through most of it, knowing me.”

A silence descended. These were two proud people, clearly, certainly not used to having things so out of reach or feeling fundamentally helpless. Lyle guessed that Eleanor hadn’t slept much lately and was surprised to also surmise that she was carrying grief.

“Can I tell you a story?” Lyle said.

“Um, sure.”

“My biggest med school mistake.”

It had been in his first year at Penn, he explained, a class in basic anatomy, involving the poking and probing of a cadaver. His dead body was called Ms. Phillips. “She’d been a schoolteacher, my partner and I were told.” Lyle explained, “I got it into my head that she hadn’t died, as we’d been told, from sudden cardiac arrest but maybe from a more chronic disease. I saw signs of malignancy. It was no big revelation but as I was pacing back and forth, lost in an internal dialogue, I was drinking coffee and I…”

“You spilled it into her body?”

“Poetically, at least, into the stomach.”

She actually laughed, which he’d hoped for. Then she clipped it back. She was in no mood for laughing.

“That’s how I feel now, like something doesn’t add up and, well, at the risk of absolutely destroying the metaphor, that I’m Ms. Phillips, the dead teacher, and someone has spilled coffee inside of me.”

“You’re right. You absolutely destroyed the metaphor.”

Now he laughed, if briefly, cleared his throat.

“Can I see your note?” he asked. “With my phone number?”

She hesitated. Was he going to take it and run? She wasn’t sure why he would, it’s just that it constituted concrete evidence. She pulled it from her pocket and laid it on the table, careful to keep a finger on it. Lyle nodded thoughtfully. He pulled a pen from his backpack and, on a napkin, copied the words he saw on the note.

“Same handwriting,” she said.

“Looks like I did give you that, after all.”

Outside, Lyle noticed a man looking in the window who looked a tad familiar, too.

“What is it?” Eleanor said.

“That guy…”

She turned around and followed his glance but no one was there. “What guy?”

“He was just…” Lyle stopped. “He’s gone, I guess.”

It was dusk now. This moment, and the mood, seemed to sober Eleanor, leaving her uncertain again what Lyle was about, even how sane. “So tell me your version of the story,” she said.

He told her about how he was supposed to attend this conference and he woke up in Steamboat at the Sheraton and there was no conference. Besides that, his brain had gone fuzzy on him and he couldn’t remember exactly how he’d gotten to the hotel, pieces missing. “Like someone slipped me a roofie.”

“I had the same feeling,” she said. “Almost like…” She paused. “It reminded me of when I’d had a seizure.”

When she said it, she could see Lyle perk up.

“You find that interesting,” she said.

He reached into his back pocket and felt for his own note, the one he’d written himself about seizure. But it wasn’t there. He’d left it on the fridge. He explained about the note to her. He asked her what she’d meant when she said it felt like a seizure, explaining that he’d never experienced one himself.

“I haven’t had one for twenty years. I do remember, because my mom told me I said it, that I felt like I lost a puzzle piece of my life.”

Lyle chewed on it silently until she asked him to let her in on the secret. He smiled again. “Bad habit of mine,” he said, “retreating into my brain to look for puzzle pieces myself. I’m thinking about the different kinds of seizures.” He told her about the small subset of powerful seizures that involve considerable memory loss, accounting for the loss of six hours or more preceding an electrical storm. By way of an answer, her blue eyes settled on him with an arched brow communicating: So what exactly are you saying?

He shrugged, communicating: Yeah, maybe what you’re thinking.

“Like I had a seizure, or we all had a seizure, and we all forgot landing in Steamboat?”

“Or flying there. Right, well, that just sounds insane. It sounds insane, right?”

“For a guy who is not a psychiatrist, you’ve got a pretty clear handle on the definition of insanity.” She smiled and so did he. “But, yes, it sounds insane.”

“What else don’t you remember, Eleanor?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“In a poorly worded, roundabout way. I mean: How much is missing for you? Do you remember flying, pulling into the jetway, or whatever you normally do?”

No, she told him, for the most part, no. She felt like she had memories of all that stuff but they were tenuous.

“I recall becoming aware that I was parked at the terminal. There had been a communications glitch.”

“You remember that?”

She closed her eyes as if grasping for it. “The truth is, it’s what I was told.”

She explained that she received a call when she had returned to San Francisco—her home base—and was told to come in for a meeting. She blinked rapidly and she held tightly to the beer mug such that Lyle wondered if she might crack the porcelain.

“You’re holding something back.”

She cleared her throat. “A passenger died.”

He’d come to expect almost anything at this point, given what had happened the last few days. Still, this caught him off guard. Eleanor’s eyes started to water and she willed away the tears.

“It’s my first duty,” she said.

“A passenger died?”

“I’m being officially investigated for dereliction of duty,” she said. “If anyone knew I was here right now…”

He waved his hands. Of course he wouldn’t say anything. “My word but I—”

“I can’t be seen talking to you because it would look like I’m monkeying with an investigation. But I am here; you’re damn right I’m here. I had nothing to do with a passenger’s death.”

“Someone is saying that?”

“No, not exactly. I… why do you keep looking over my shoulder?” She sounded exasperated.

“Sorry, rude. I’m feeling paranoid. Some guy keeps walking back and forth out there and I—”

“If you’d rather—”

“I’m sorry, go on.”

She explained to him that a passenger named Milt Vener had died. He was an old guy and sometimes people died on planes. It had happened to her twice before, once owing to a stroke and another time, relatedly, to a blood clot. This time, though, blunt force trauma.

“Someone hit him in the head,” she said.

Lyle felt again the ripple of familiarity like déjà vu that disappeared as quickly as it came. Then a moment of panic in which he wondered if he’d hit an old man on the head. This was all lost on Eleanor who seemed now intent on getting her story out. She said the investigators for the airline and the FAA had been very formal, giving her little information. They’d treated her in two meetings and a brief preliminary one by phone as if she hadn’t been a valorous twenty-year veteran.

“The only hint I’ve had where they might be going with this is that they’ve asked a lot of pointed questions about my first officer. His name is Jerry Weathers, and they’ve—”

“Say it again.”

“What?”

“Jimmy Weathers?”

“Jerry.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Why?” She studied Lyle. “Who cares?”

“I’m having one of those moments.”

She nodded, and described the first officer as lanky, all elbows, full head of brown hair, a bit of buggy eyes. “Bit like a fish,” he said and, just as he said it, she said the same thing.

“You know him?” she said.

“I think he’s been walking around outside.”

Eleanor moved so quickly that she very nearly whirled around. Her elbow hit her water glass, sending the last drops spinning. She turned back to Lyle. “Damn it, are you serious?” She quickly lowered her voice to try to limit what already was too much attention caused by her spill.

“Seems to describe the guy. He’s gone, I think. I don’t see why you’re so—”

“Have you been listening?” She leaned in so close he could smell her soap and the touch of perspiration and tension seeping through. “I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t know if he’s playing me in some way, or what he’s up to.”

Lyle got it now. This first officer might be turning on her, but for the life of Lyle none of that made sense.

“I’ve got to go,” she said.

“Please, wait.”

She shook her head. She looked at the doorway to the right of the counter, the hallway to the bathroom, and a back door. Lyle felt a terrible urge to say I can help you but he didn’t know if it might come off as patronizing when that wasn’t what he meant at all. Most of all, he didn’t know if he was capable of helping her when he couldn’t help himself or even decide if he wanted to. He watched the pilot walk away and felt an immediate sense of loss. It was the very feeling he’d had for years crystallized into a moment—he should be doing something or saying something because life was slipping away—and being unable to do anything about it. There was nothing he could do about it now.

Outside it was fully dark. Lyle absently got on his bike and let a million questions slide around his brain without focusing on any particular one of them. With the sun down, the early evening took on a decided winter chill. He was glad he’d put on this wool sweater. He pedaled along the west side of the park on Scott, figuring he’d go left on Fell. He saw the driverless car.

It crept along behind him in modest residential traffic. At the corner of Oak, a thoroughfare with thickening traffic, Lyle thought about Occam’s razor and the likelihood of the simplest explanation. Maybe there were just a lot of these cars around. He took a right onto Oak, heading east, away from home, just to test the theory. A quarter way down the block, he looked back and saw the driverless car take a right too. Okay, thought Lyle, still nothing certain, given Oak’s popularity. A car horn exploded.

The driver was warning Lyle that, distracted, he’d swerved into the lane. The human driver shouted something Lyle couldn’t hear. Lyle stopped along the edge of the far right lane. The fracas and pace and bouncing headlights of the cars speeding Oak disoriented Lyle. The feeling jostled him, sparked a memory of Steamboat, the cold and dark, that he couldn’t quite grasp. He looked into the fray of oncoming lights and couldn’t see the bubble car now. Had it disappeared?

Then, boom, there it was again, nearly on him, just a car length back. It had been hidden behind larger vehicles. The bubble neared. Fear jolted Lyle and he pedaled again.

Lyle willed himself to take a deep breath. He went right on Steiner. The traffic thinned. Lyle kept a modest pace. He craned over his right shoulder. The bubbly autonomous vehicle turned right on Steiner. So dutiful, it used its blinker and slithered onward, a perfect citizen, an innocuous robot, a guileless storm trooper. Lyle sped up. Then screeched the brakes when a car door opened. He swerved, righted himself, then at Duboce Avenue he went left and made a quick right on Sanchez Street; glancing behind him, he took another right on Fourteenth.

The driverless car went right too. There could be no doubt. This seemed to Lyle to be of zero interest to anybody but Lyle. Either these cars had become so common no one noticed, or everyone was so consumed with their own thing that they’d not have noticed a pink elephant following Lyle. He pedaled until he came to an alley and took a sharp right into it, then stopped. The car followed him. Lyle dismounted his bike.

The car slowed. It looked to Lyle like a bubble with a brain.

The car inched forward, and Lyle stepped in front of it. He scanned the attached houses across the street, a short, stark white one decorated with purple perennials attached to a taller greenish-gray house with exterior metal staircases. Was anyone in the window to bear witness? No such luck. Lyle pulled out his phone. He called up the video function and hit record.

The car had come to a complete stop ten or so feet from Lyle. He couldn’t help imbue it with human characteristics. In this case, Lyle decided that it had made a decision. It wasn’t going to run him over. He walked to the front of the car, his video still recording. Lyle, careful not to move out from the front of the car so that it might have an escape path, peered inside. He nearly laughed when he saw the cup holder. Maybe autonomous vehicles got thirsty. Other than that, the bulb of technology wanted for anything human. Sterile, beige leather seats matched either side of an instrument panel between. A trough stood in place of the dash with more gadgetry beneath it.

Lyle looked up at the black eye on the top.

The car lurched forward.

Lyle lunged out of the way. Off went the car. Just a roll of the wheel at first and then a sincere acceleration.

Lyle looked around. Did anyone see that? Did he see that? The car disappeared down Lloyd, took a right and by the time Lyle hopped on his bike again, it had disappeared. He didn’t stop riding until he’d reached City Hall. He took his bicycle onto the train with him. No car would follow him here. Not that he particularly cared. He was thinking of the Google car the way he’d think of a patient’s medical symptom, not as something to wish away but as a key piece of evidence. What was the car telling him?

Mostly, it was reiterating to him what his note had told him: he wasn’t imagining things. Second, it was telling him that whatever strange situation he’d stumbled into involved a powerful actor, powerful enough to involve a driverless car. How powerful did that make someone?

It did give him two disparate pieces of evidence to connect, and disparate clues were of immense value to Lyle when he’d taken on medical mysteries. The more disparate the better. Someone from central California with a pronounced stiff neck and sound sensitivity could have valley fever. Talk about disparate: here was this driverless car and then there was the note on his refrigerator. The note referred to seizures and channelopathy and Lyle had trouble seeing any Venn diagram with an overlap between these disease states and a Google car.

The note mentioned Google. And now the car. What was someone trying to do?

Draw him in?

Warn him?

Taunt him?

To what end?

Lyle looked through rows of commuters at the map on the wall over the door. He knew where he was headed and hadn’t fully admitted it to himself, or the reasons why. He could see the stop on the map, downtown Berkeley, Shattuck Avenue. He was going to find Melanie. His jaw tightened. The last time he saw her might’ve been eighteen months earlier. She’d stopped by his house with a bag of groceries. “Green things,” she said, “to help your liver process.” It was loving, painful, and patronizing. She’d looked around his house like a detective. “I’m here if you need me,” she’d said and closed the door quietly.

The time before that had been their last screaming fight—her screaming at him to wake up and him fighting with silence. Then her acceptance had set in.

What inspired this visit?

The question slithered over and around his brain, a deadly snake in his valley of denial. He stared absently at a woman clicking on her tablet and considered the question. He was going to warn Melanie, right? Warn her about what? A note he’d written to himself? He shook his head and knew that to be too simplistic. He swiveled his head and watched the man sitting next to him pecking at a game on his phone, transfixed. So, Lyle thought, maybe I’m going to ask her if she’d heard of anything like this potential pandemic; she’s a nurse, and one of the most well-read and thoughtful people anywhere. If it’s out there, she’ll know.

He shook his head and watched another man wearing headphones while staring at a phone he held so close to his face that it couldn’t possibly have been good for his eyes. It was oddly peaceful, Lyle thought, all these people so lost in their virtual worlds that Lyle could just stare at them, lapping up and observing the world without interference or conflict. No risk of interaction. Then he had a sudden thought about what he was going to ask Melanie. The question sent a tremor through him. He tried to will the question away and it clung and festered and he knew instantly he couldn’t deny it.

I’m going to ask her why I can’t do it anymore.

I can’t figure anything out. I don’t know how to try. Then he smiled, a private smile, because he knew even that wasn’t quite it. He settled back in his seat and let his shoulders relax. He was going to let the thing reveal itself to him, this powerful motivation leading him east. He looked back at the man sitting next to him lost in a game that involved shooting blocks that, when he hit them, turned into stars and soared and then turned into points.

A drip of drool gathered on the corner of the man’s lip.

Lyle closed his eyes, searching broken, blurry memories from his trip to Steamboat, and disparate clues.

Thirty-Six

Jackie Badger pulled her rental into the dirt parking lot at Lantern outside of Hawthorne. Alarm bells went off. Why were there six other cars in the lot?

She found out when she walked in the heavy, steel door. In the middle of the room, cubicles had been pushed back to make way for a conference table. Around the table sat eight people, most of whom she recognized but only distantly. Lantern representatives from various tech companies. They’d gathered only once before, at least in her presence, just after Denny’s death. They’d called it a fact-finding mission, but mostly it led to an internal, off-the-record explanation that Denny had died from a heart attack and that the Lantern program would be put on hold. Jackie had held her tongue, not sure what to say, absorbing occasional pointed looks from Alex and, at least once, giving one back. Would there be profit in accusing Alex of, what, murdering Denny? Police were not called, foul play never asserted, which Jackie rightly assumed was the product of wanting to keep this eye-popping project under wraps.

Now they’d called Jackie back to Nevada. It was early evening. The six men and two women sitting around the table were a characteristic lot of ambitious nerds. The men wore jeans and loose T-shirts and fashionable, colorful tennis shoes. Both women wore sweatshirts. In the middle of the table, a speakerphone with a green light on the side. People listening in. Jackie figured telecommunications giants. At the head sat Alex, as petite as Jackie, no less feisty.

“I should have brought donuts,” Jackie said, seeking composure. She unzipped a light jacket.

“Have a seat, Jackie,” said Alex.

“I left something in my car,” Jackie said. “Can I go grab it?”

“Get it later,” said a man she recognized as belonging to Microsoft.

Jackie had vacillated about responding to the request for her presence. In the end, she decided she held plenty of cards.

“I thought Lantern was disbanded.”

Alex cleared her throat. She had evidently been christened here to take the lead. Maybe she’d always been in the lead. It looked to Jackie like an intervention.

“Jackie, we know about Steamboat.”

Jackie blinked several times rapidly.

“Excuse me?”

“We know,” Alex said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Damn it!” One of the men slapped the table. “We need to know what happened.”

“Alex,” Jackie said, glowering at Alex, “what is this? You… you took out Denny so that you could, what, take over?”

“Jackie, I’m not sure you realize how serious this is. You’ve effectively beta tested a very powerful, very dangerous system, and you’ve taken it over from the inside. We need you to remand control, and walk away, or…”

Jackie looked at the other members of the group, swerving her head.

“I have no idea what Alex—is that your name, Alex?—is talking about. Steamboat? Where is that even? Colorado, if memory serves. Something happened there?”

Alex pursed her lips.

“Jackie, this is pointless. I’ve prepared everyone here for your manipulations and cons. I’ve also prepared them for your genius, which is the better part of what is dangerous here. When I realized the system had been used, co-opted, I, we, did a lot of homework. It’s clear that you chose a time and a place remote enough that it might not be traced through news reports. You monkeyed with flight logs—or someone did—and must’ve taken a dozen other steps to cover your tracks, not the least of which was deploying technology that appears to have turned to mush the memories of people on the ground there.”

“My God, Alex, listen to yourself. You sound like someone with intimate knowledge of whatever it is you’re accusing me of. Is anyone else hearing what I’m hearing? It sounds like an outright confession. Something very, very sinister is going on, and I’m out of here.”

“Jackie, who is Dr. Lyle Martin?”

Jackie reddened, froze like a strawberry-colored ice statue.

“You’re in cahoots with him somehow, right?” Alex said.

“Who is—”

“Some doctor who was on the plane, and that Jackie appears to be following, or communicating with,” Alex said, then looked at Jackie. “That’s right. I can do my own sleuthing.”

“He’s a friend. This has nothing to do with—”

“This is how this is going to go down, Jackie. You are dismissed from Google, put on notice that we will, even at the risk to this group, go public with your beta or alpha test, or whatever you want to call it, and pursue murder charges in Denny’s death. Let this end here.”

Faces turned to Jackie. She took a long pause.

“Before any of you reach any conclusion here, I want to offer you an alternative version of events. Alex is evidently the real genius here, and she is scapegoating me. I suspect she wrested control of this from Denny, maybe took him out. I think I know why, too.”

“Jackie, I can’t even get into the system. Somehow, you’ve locked us out.”

“Lies. You know I’m on to you. You’re testing, preparing. You’re worried you might actually have to use Lantern. Denny explained it to me. Look at what’s happening in the world; it’s just as you worried: an authoritarian got elected, separatists storming Capitol Hill armed to the teeth, or a gunman indiscriminately killing toddlers at a preschool field trip— the list goes on.”

She directed her voice to the speakerphone. “Overseas, too. What nation-state is safe? Right?” she said. “I’m not sure if it’s altruism driving you, or the business of self-interest in keeping a relatively calm world. In any case, Alex, you’ve taken full advantage of your partners. What would China Telecom or Orange do if they knew you’d been toying around with their access points?”

“You’re done, Jackie,” Alex said. “This is not a toy. This is dangerous, even deadly, and it was in Steamboat.” Alex shook her head. “Don’t pretend you don’t know that, Jackie.”

“Wait until I go public. Wait until I tell people that we—the tech world—are responsible for the problem in the first place.” Jackie suddenly stood, her voice rising.

“You’re done, Jackie,” Alex repeated.

Jackie refused to back down. She dug in. “Everyone in this group knows what I’m talking about, Alex. You came together initially because we felt we had a duty to deal with side effects of the digital world we’ve created.”

“Enough!”

Jackie put up a hand. “Maybe it was more selfish than that, but that’s at least partly true—an altruism, an effort to deal with the side effects of our own work, your work. Our industry, our spectacular innovation, has led us to this place, this culture of fury. With all these devices, people are gorging on ideas that reinforce their political and social views. They are getting instant reminders when someone has affronted these precious perspectives, and, all the while, they are so facedown in their gadgets, they are losing their ability to empathize, cooperate, compromise. We’ve created a path of least resistance for people to escape and disengage. That’s precisely what Denny thought.”

Alex pushed herself back from the table, an indication she’d had enough. “Regardless of the half merits to what you’re saying, you’re not wriggling out of this.”

“You’ve created a fail-safe, and you evidently tested it, and you want a fall guy, or fall woman,” Jackie said. “You need to get rid of me because I’ve put it all together. I know that you and your partners have been swapping out individual wireless routers to ones with faster speeds—ones that can send the kinds of arrhythmic radio bursts that lead to hypnotic states. You know what I’m talking about: the cable or phone company calls and offers to upgrade your model, promising faster speeds. People are gobbling up the free new modems and routers. They love faster service from upgraded radio and cell-phone towers. Oh, but do they know that Lantern will put them on hold and erase whatever grieves them?”

“This sounds a lot like a confession, Jackie.”

“Hardly. I’m telling you everything I know, and that can endanger you.”

Alex stood. “I have proof,” she blurted. She looked solemnly at her colleagues. “I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. It’s personally very disturbing, painful.

“Let me direct your attention to my screen.” The brushed silver Apple laptop had been sitting in front of Alex the entire time, top closed. She leaned over and opened the top, clicked some keys, and turned the device to face the table.

“What is this?” asked the man from Microsoft.

“It’s a video taken from the day that Denny died.” On the screen, Denny sat in a chair in the room downstairs, outside the testing chamber. Alex moved the cursor over the virtual play button and pressed down. The video began. Denny appeared to be reading some papers. He leafed through the papers, underlined a passage with a pen, read some more. It went on for a minute.

“What the hell?” Alex said.

“I’m not sure what this tells us,” said a woman to Alex’s left.

“What’s going on there?” said a voice from the speaker.

“This isn’t the right video,” Alex said. The image remained innocuous, Denny reading away. “It must be a mix-up.” Alex looked at Jackie, who shook her head and smirked. “I’ll find the right one. In the meantime, I have something much better.

“I’m going to show you video of Jackie boarding a flight to Steamboat. It’s taken from airport security. I was able to get ahold of it. You’ll be able to see the date, and the time stamp. So this can be the end of this.”

She turned her laptop around, clicked and clacked, turned it back. A grainy image appeared that showed a line of passengers lined up to board. The angle of the video suggested it was taken from a camera embedded on the large monitor behind the gate’s ticket counter. Alex pressed play and the passengers started to board.

“No way,” a voice said.

A petite woman walked past the counter and onto the jet bridge. Her face became unmistakable. It wasn’t Jackie. It was Alex.

The room exploded into chaos.

Jackie stared at Alex and walked to the door.

“Denny warned me,” Alex said. She was tapping on the window of Jackie’s rental. Jackie put the car in reverse. Several of the group’s members stood in the doorway, listening to Alex scream.

“When Denny brought you on, he told me he’d never met anyone like you,” Alex yelled. “He said you could solve any problem. It wasn’t a compliment, Jackie. It was part of a short but pointed explanation about why we needed to limit what we disclosed to you. He didn’t trust you, or what you’d do if you knew everything, Jackie.”

Jackie gripped the steering wheel like a mountain climber holding a rope for dear life.

“He warned me that you were unstable, possibly even insane. That’s why he didn’t tell you everything. He thought, he thought,” Alex repeated, “that somehow he could get the benefit of your abilities without taking on the liabilities.” She stared at Jackie. “It’s worse than that. You’re a sociopath.”

Jackie cracked the window.

“Frankly, Alex, I don’t care about any of your ugly business, except for one thing: You will,” she hissed, “leave Dr. Martin alone.”

She hit the accelerator, screaming backward, gravel crackling beneath the tires.

Thirty-Seven

Minutes later, Lyle leaned against a worn utility pole that leaned slightly to the left. A metaphor for Berkeley itself, he thought, staring at a light-gray-and-white house at the corner of Milvia and Francisco. A steeply angled roof covered the small- to medium-size house with a tall red chimney pointing skyward. Lyle pictured two bedrooms upstairs, one for the boy and one for Melanie. The pockmarked lawn cracked brown with drought. Naturally, Melanie wouldn’t waste water. An interior light showed the back of a couch. It suggested someone was home, a proposition reinforced by a Honda in the driveway. Homey, Lyle thought, and winced. The road not taken. The road sprinted away from.

He walked his bike up a concrete path to the wooden stairs to the porch. He glanced upward at a circular window on the second floor, dark inside; his eyes then diverted almost magnetically to wires that laced the space between the house and the house next to it. In a tangle, the wires connected to Melanie’s house in the back corner and then to the house next door on its roof and so on throughout the block. Lyle followed the wires back to the utility pole and wondered whether these were telephone or Internet or electricity or maybe all of the above. His eyes were so heavenward that he didn’t hear the front door open, nor Melanie walk down the stairs and gawk at him as he gawked at the wires.

“I know that look,” she said.

The sound startled him. He looked up and saw Melanie holding a toy robot. It was in her left hand, a cavity in the red robot’s belly open. In her other hand, a screwdriver.

“Peño?”

“Melanie.”

A red sweater buttoned below her neck hugged her shoulders. The long, plain gray skirt told Lyle she’d probably worked that day. The moment he saw her, he ached.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She dipped her chin and half smiled, eyes widening, her nonverbal way of saying What brings you, Lyle? Say something.

“It’s a beautiful place,” he said.

She laughed out loud. “Peño,” she said again. It was an ice-breaking moment, part of an unspoken language in which she, just by saying his nickname, was calling out the oddity of him showing up, without explanation, and then staring at her electrical wires and commenting on her house. Perfectly Lyle.

“Is this about the text? I thought that was just spam,” she said.

This shook him back to the concrete. “Text?”

Behind Melanie, a face appeared at the screen door. It was a boy, little more than a toddler. “Mommy?” Stout with bangs. Not Lyle’s kid, Lyle thought, and winced. Melanie caught it. “Be right there, sweetie. Can you wash up for dinner?”

“K.”

She turned around and looked for a cue from Lyle. Did he want to talk about the Elephant at the Screen Door?

“Text,” he urged.

“You texted me: Kill your phone before it kills you.”

“What?”

Melanie set down the robot and screwdriver and pulled her phone from her pocket. She scrolled the large-screened device and held up the phone to him.

“You didn’t send this?”

“When did it come?”

“Ten days or so ago. Middle of the night.”

Lyle gritted his teeth in focus. He hadn’t remembered sending it. Was that when he was in Steamboat? What did it mean?

“There’s another one, shortly after. It’s even weirder.” She handed him the phone.

He read the text: Must find brilliant woman from last UCSF class.

He shook his head. Nonsense. But it tickled in his brain just the way random clues tickled him.

“Why are you here, Lyle?”

He met her eyes and then couldn’t look at her anymore. Her tenderness overcame him. She had a hero’s compassion with a survivor’s backbone. How long had he been blind to this strength? He mustered the courage to say what he wanted to say. He looked down.

“Who is this woman? From your class. Were you having an aff—”

“Me. No way. You have no right—” He stopped. This wasn’t why he’d come, not to fight.

The last class, he remembered, had happened prior to that fateful Africa trip. It lodged painfully in his craw. He’d put Melanie at risk by allowing her to come with him, then humiliated her on the airplane by diagnosing her pregnancy, and, as much as any of that, he well might’ve blown his analysis about what was ailing the small village. He’d said it was man-made. On what basis? Whimsical, cynical half-baked sophistry.

But she’d cheated on him, not the other way around.

“Are you sure you’re okay, Lyle? Are you sick?”

“When did I lose it?” he blurted.

“What?”

He fought himself, his pride, his urge not to ask or delve into his own bullshit. He never tried to make it about him. It was about the patient, disease, pathology. Maybe he was those things now. He made himself ask.

“When did I give up?”

“Wow,” she said, then almost immediately: “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say that. What’s happened, Lyle?”

He shook his head. I don’t know.

She looked over her shoulder, wanting to make sure they were alone.

She started to say something and then thought better of it. “Do you want to find some other time to talk?”

He looked to her in that moment like a patient who just wanted to be given a shot. Get it over with.

“I’ve thought about it a ton,” she said, “when it all went to shit.”

She told him about a weekend they’d had in a yurt near Santa Cruz. It had been a few weeks after Lyle had been asked to speak at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. While he was there, the talk got called off because of a shooting at a nearby school. Lyle remembered that part well enough. After the shooting, he had been witness to an argument among several researchers at the CDC, one of whom had a student at the school. The kid was okay but the mom was enraged. Enraged, she’d railed against the gun culture. Another researcher took offense and railed back. They’d nearly come to blows. On the way out of the parking lot, the second researcher, giving the middle finger to the first researcher, plowed into the security hut and, while unhurt, totaled his car.

“That’s when your withdrawal really intensified,” Melanie said. “I’m not sure if what happened in Atlanta had anything to do with it. That’s what I thought. But then I started to wonder whether that was convenient and it might not be us—”

“But—”

“Listen, Lyle, I appreciate that you devoted your life to helping people and then found that people weren’t always reciprocating, weren’t always helping themselves—that they were hurting themselves.” She saw that he wanted to interrupt again. She held up her hands. “You must’ve known that all along. It’s always been a razor’s-edge fight. So I suspect it was something in you, or us. Relationships live on the razor’s edge, too. The great passion had subsided for us, the easy part. It was work, all of it; you got overwhelmed.”

“No, I—” He stopped. He didn’t have an immediate answer. Just more questions: How do I get it back? How do I work through this soup?

Something very bad is going to happen, Melanie. I need to figure out how to stop it. He hated those words and didn’t know how to ask for help.

He couldn’t get any words out.

“Maybe you should talk to someone,” Melanie said.

“No—”

“Just listen. You’ve got this powerful brain, the most powerful brain. That power, any power, has a flip side. It might be that you’ve gotten off track. I think that’s what happened in Africa. You said there was a conspiracy, some terrible man-made thing. But there was no conspiracy or anything like that. Just a disease that you didn’t want to—”

“Something’s going to happen.”

Now she smiled with such love and caring that it couldn’t possibly be seen as patronizing even though she was filled with pity. “Lyle…”

A car pulled into the driveway, crackling gravel beneath the tires as it came to a stop. Melanie stared at the car and then turned as the screen door opened behind her.

“Daddy!” the boy said.

“Sweetie, he’ll be right inside. Can you go wait for us?”

The boy somehow understood she really meant this particular request. “K,” he said again, and he disappeared.

From the boxy silver car stood a tall man in a T-shirt. He walked around the front of the car with a basketball under his long arm, wearing shorts.

“What happened to your eye?”

“Elbow,” the man said. “I gotta take up chess.” He smiled at Melanie and then offered Lyle a guileless nod. Dark stubble peppered his chin. “Eh, who am I kidding? I stink at chess.”

“George,” he said. “Are you a neighbor?”

“Lyle. I’m…”

“Oh, of course.” Recognition took over his face. He nodded again, a second greeting, this one with a certain respect for the situation. “Nice to meet you, Lyle.” He cleared his throat. “Don’t let me interrupt, and I want to go inside and see Evan.” This was guileless, too. It gave Lyle what would be his tiniest solace when he thought about this later. At least Melanie wasn’t with a jerk. Now all he could think was, Holy shit, she’s got a boyfriend or husband or live-in whatever, maybe the father of her child, or not? The screen door closed behind the man.

“Peño.” She looked at him and he was impassive, that same ingrown look that had gotten them here in the first place.

“It’s a beautiful family.”

Tears dripped down Melanie’s cheeks.

He knew what it meant. He wasn’t the victim here.

A numb subway ride home. It wasn’t that Lyle hadn’t been expecting this when he went to see Melanie. He had been expecting anything, nothing. He had let himself walk into a situation unexposed. If he could have seen himself at a distance, with perspective, he might’ve realized how valuable that was, how necessary and, more than that, how much it was like the old version of Lyle. He walked into situations unexposed, dangerous ones, emotionally fraught ones, deadly ones, and he led with his curiosity and an essential faith things would work out. Now, on the subway, his openness left him blown apart.

“I hope they kill every one of those jerks,” a woman said to another woman sitting in a seat next to and beneath where Lyle stood with his bike. She was evidently referring to the proposed show of arms on Capitol Hill.

The other woman had her arms wrapped around herself, as if cold. She squeezed her arms. “I wonder if this is what it feels like before a civil war? You don’t see it and then it’s all of a sudden there and people are picking sides.”

The woman who had made the comment looked at her phone. Lyle glanced over her shoulder at the political website she read. He couldn’t make out the particulars but could tell it was a firebrand, lamenting and attacking the other side. The woman read and clucked her tongue and muttered to herself, bemused and irritated by what she read, increasingly furious at the other side. It brought him back to Melanie and her description of the weekend in the yurt where she said he’d lost it. That was easier for Lyle to think about than the image of the boy and the man. The yurt. Lyle could only distantly recall it. When he did, he pictured himself that weekend as a lightbulb that was flickering, losing energy, petering out. Or maybe the better analogy was to a dying star; pulsing with dead energy, poised to explode into nothing.

People got on and off the train at the last stop in Oakland. The metal tube hummed and shimmied beneath the bay. Lyle held tight to his bike’s handlebars. He found void and shadows when he tried to understand what had piqued him so much that weekend in the yurt. Melanie blamed it on that painful trip to the CDC in Atlanta. En route home at Hartsfield-Jackson airport, he’d waited three hours in security, which had been all backed up because of the shooting, and then missed his plane. Stuck there, he’d sat and watched the security guards and found he was imagining them as immune-system cells, carefully looking about the way b-cells and t-cells, the immune system’s two power brokers, combed the body and targeted foreign invaders. What a system, arguably the most sophisticated in the body. The defenders roamed freely, instantly sensing danger and then sending waves of soldiers to attack. Not just that: the soldiers adapted. They would, at the rate of a supercomputer, try out a trillion different combinations of proteins to figure out which could kill the invader. It required a system this powerful to survive in a world with a trillion different possible invaders, from flu to cancer to random toxins. A mad scramble for survival, the immune system scrapping it out against the bacteria or virus, each desperate to survive.

Any system so powerful, though, had a dangerous side. No great survival mechanism or instinct goes without its dark sibling. Autoimmune disorders had blossomed, or, at least, we were seeing more of them. Our great defense system, the man on the wall, turning around out of control and blowing everything inside the village to shit.

At the Atlanta airport, Lyle watched the guards and thought about soldiers, police, vigilantes, armed youth, the suburban dads who, terrified, shot some kid on-site, asking questions later. On the flight, he hardly slept. He could feel a generalized fear, stoking people to defend themselves, the way that the immune system defends itself, then becoming so deadly effective, so out of control, that the mechanism turned inward.

Why had he been devoting everything to help people who were turning on one another?

Thinking back to that time, as he sat on the subway, Lyle wondered if he’d, in a way, done exactly the same thing. He’d withdrawn, protecting himself by disengaging only to discover that he’d actually destroyed the good parts of his life and himself, too. Depression, sadness, he knew the literature, they, too, were outgrowths of survival mechanisms, like the fear and anxiety that warn us of danger, remind us of situations where we’ve been harmed and could be so again, but toxic and even deadly when spun notches out of control. Had he protected himself and ground to a halt as a result?

Melanie had told him that intimacy and love were the true medicine. He’d never have used those words. But damn it if he didn’t know she was right. The antidote in the micro, the antidote in the macro. Hard to let in when the perimeter defenses get jacked to the sky.

Lyle got off at the Civic Center and burst with energy on his ride to the apartment, not joy but grinding, an effort to exhaust himself. Lost in himself, he didn’t see the driverless car tagging a few paces behind.

He considered the new piece of evidence: the text he’d sent Melanie about a brilliant student. On its face, that sounded as bizarre and vague as the pandemic thing. First of all, it was three years ago, and there were myriad brilliant students in the UCSF medical classes and he knew almost none of the ones in a giant lecture. They sat out there and he stood up there. Sometimes, one would ask a question or he’d meet a few in office hours. He couldn’t remember a single student from that particular semester, well, maybe his graduate assistant. Emily, he thought with a last name that started with S or C. Maybe worth a contact.

Back at home, he went to the refrigerator to see what modest remains he’d left himself. He opened the creaky door and, no sooner had he done so, shut it. He stared at the front of the fridge. In the middle hung a magnet advertising a local pizza place. Last time that Lyle had seen that magnet, it held the note that he’d written himself about the pandemic.

The note was gone.

Lyle heard a gunshot and pasted himself to the ground.

Thirty-Eight

In the ten seconds that followed, Lyle felt a deep connection with and understanding of the veterans he had treated during his residency. That wasn’t a gunshot. It had been a tire popping out his window. Yet he’d heard a gunshot, like the Vietnam vets he had seen at the VA wincing at as little as the click of an unfolding chair. What made it strange is that Lyle couldn’t recall being amid gunfire.

Then he could.

He pushed himself up into a push-up position and saw bursts of gunfire. Flashes of light against the snow. He cascaded across a fleeting montage: a body in orange on a tarmac; a cavernous building echoing with footsteps; a stricken child. He tried to hold on to the images. They evaporated.

He walked to the cupboard over the dish rack and unscrewed the cap on a bottle of Black Label, mostly drained. He poured a finger, finished it, poured a second and walked to a recliner in the open area that served as a living room across from the kitchen, staring for a long time at the distant magnet on the refrigerator.

What happened to the note?

His phone buzzed. He saw a text from a number he didn’t recognize. It was just a link. Spam, he immediately thought, and then the second message arrived from the same number. It read: We’re not imagining things. I’m using a new, temporary cell phone. You can get me here. Eleanor.

The pilot. Apparently fearing some digital scrutiny. Lyle clicked on the link she’d sent him. It brought up a newspaper article. The headline read: ODD NIGHT LEAVES SGT. IN CRITICAL.

The outlet was called Steamboat Today, the mountain town’s local newspaper. The article said that a police sergeant remained in critical condition after crashing his cruiser into Lindy’s Mountain Art. The local police said they were investigating the late-night crash and stood by an officer with a spotless record.

Lyle saw plainly that the unusual night being described matched the date of his landing in Steamboat. He drifted over the article again and again and kept settling on the words electrical problems. He felt the liquor clouding his thoughts. His head lolled with exhaustion. He fought it and scrounged for his laptop.

He looked up Dr. Jennifer Sanchez, the darling of the infectious disease department. She had moved her office from Parnassus to Mission Bay, the new UCSF research headquarters. She had taken the title of associate dean. Just days earlier, he dismissed the idea of going to talk to her and now backtracked, considered it.

He next went looking for his former assistant at UCSF. Searching through various disciplines and using Emily as a keyword, he eventually found Emily Chase. That was her, his former assistant in his lecture class. That was someone he’d have no problem talking to; she’d always seen him for what he was, guileless, rather than cunning, in his less conventional tactics. Maybe she could help guide him through the department if he needed expertise, and maybe she could make sense of this text about a student he might’ve made reference to.

With blurry eyes, he pulled up Eleanor’s text. He put his fingers on the keyboard to respond and typed Let’s meet again and fell asleep before he hit send.

For two days, that was it. He slept and sat, and thought. Repeat. He ate there, too. He looked to be waiting. He looked in the direction of the refrigerator but his mind’s eye often went to Steamboat, the little of it he could recall. Little by little, his efforts gave way to images and reflections of Melanie. He dreamed about her.

When he could no longer take the company of the stench of his dead ardor, he took a shower. Long beneath the hot water he scrubbed. He shaved away the itchy stubble. He put on khakis and a clean T-shirt.

He emerged into the kitchen, walked to the refrigerator, and stared at the magnet where the note had been. Now the magnet once again held a note. Lyle glanced around the apartment. He saw no one, heard nothing. He walked to the refrigerator and read the note. It was the same piece of paper as before, but it was turned around and a new message had been written on the side opposite.

It read:

And there was a little red drawing of a heart.

Lyle carefully plucked the note and read it again, and again. The handwriting was neat, careful. As to meaning, Lyle couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Only briefly did he wonder if the note had been written by Eleanor. No way, he dismissed the idea. Equally briefly, he wondered if he, somehow, had written the note himself. Could he be truly losing his mind—truly?

In fact, the opposite was true. Lyle was completely about his wits. Through his inaction, he had prompted the note to be written, smoked out a move by an invisible adversary. He smiled sadly. On some level, it’s what he had wanted, hoped for, manipulated, even if he wasn’t fully conscious of his tactics. If only subconsciously, he’d sensed a pattern that entailed a foe, an enemy—his match?—trying to get his attention, and when he lay fallow, it provoked him. A car followed him, or a note disappeared, and then reappeared. Still, this reappearing note hardly qualified as a victory because Lyle didn’t exactly know what he would do with this new data point. He didn’t know if he could muster the energy to pursue the answers.

He had to look at his phone to discover the date, day, and time. It was a Tuesday in early December at 10:20 in the morning.

He pulled on a leather jacket and headed down the stairwell.

Thirty-Nine

Mission Bay’s campus had exploded since he’d abandoned his life. High-rises had sprung up in clusters belonging to different medical specialties. A wide promenade ran to the water, bisecting the sprawling campus. Open space braced one side of the promenade and shops anchored the other. Lyle drained black coffee at a café and listened to researchers bitch and moan.

He found Dr. Sanchez’s office on the eleventh floor of the new Kartling Immunology Center, a modern building that, despite its large windows and curved middle, came across as boring, lacking creativity. Dr. Sanchez wasn’t in her office and Lyle didn’t leave his name with her assistant. He did pick up that she’d be back in an hour.

Thirty minutes later, he found Emily Chase, his former assistant, in the Neuroscience Department, a long block away. She was a postdoc now, which entitled her to a small, shared office with desks along opposite walls. She was alone when Lyle poked his head in. She practically leapt from her chair.

“Dr. Martin!”

He looked bewildered and she laughed. “I forgot: you never grasped how appreciative your fans are.”

He smiled and looked down and realized that his assistant had changed. Her tone now came across not as unctuous or adoring but, rather, as confident enough that she could speak freely and candidly. She was all grown up.

“What brings you in? Are you coming back? What are you up to, Dr. Martin? I get asked all the time.”

He waved his hand and said, “Long story.” Which was true. “I could use your help.”

“Of course.” She picked up his seriousness and adjusted. She sat in her swivel chair and gestured to a plastic black chair against the wall. “I’ve got a subject coming in fifteen minutes. You want to talk now or will it take longer?”

Lyle sat and explained with as little fanfare as he might that he needed to get a list of the students from his last survey class. Did she have something like that? She pursed her lips, thinking about it, and, Lyle figured, considering about whether to ask him why he needed such a thing. But, in the end, she didn’t. She pulled her chair up to her computer and she clacked about on the keys.

“Something like this is probably the best I can do without working through the administrative system, and, even then…”

He stood so he could peer over her shoulder. Her screen showed an old e-mail that she’d dug up. It was titled: Martin, Section II; Population List.

Lyle, looking at the screen, realized he’d been copied on the e-mail. Naturally, he’d not paid attention; no point in a survey class like this and the e-mail had been little more than a formality. Emily clicked open a spreadsheet. It included names, student ID numbers, and affiliation as med student, postdoc, fellow, or audit/other. Lyle looked for a tab that might indicate there were pictures, though he was not surprised to find no such thing.

“Can you print it out?”

“Of course.” She clicked the command. In the corner, a printer hummed to life.

Lyle sat back and looked glassy-eyed.

“The deep-in-thought look,” Emily said. She laughed.

“Sorry. Sorry. Congratulations. Neuroscience?”

“All the rage these days,” she said.

“What’s your area of research?”

“Attention, prefrontal cortex, with some emphasis on the default network. Gets granular from there.”

“Good for you,” Lyle said and meant it. He cleared his throat. “You know much about seizures, electrical activity, ion channels?”

She studied him. “Only in passing.”

The printer came to a stop. Lyle could see her desperate curiosity to understand his reappearance. There would be gossip.

He stood. “Thank you, Emily.”

At Dr. Sanchez’s door, he didn’t have a chance to consider a strategy. She’d already seen him. An instant of concern-colored surprise crossed her face as she stood beside her assistant’s desk holding an opened manila folder. She snapped the folder shut and quickly reoriented as the best politicians can do.

“Look what the cat dragged in. Dr. Martin. Come in!” She pulled reading glasses from her nose and let them hang by the cord around her neck. “Ernie, hold my calls. Dr. Martin, can I get you a cup of coffee? Come in, come in.”

Once a world-class cyclist, Dr. Sanchez had grown sturdier and matronly. She sat behind a thick desk and offered him the chair across from her. She smiled. It was warm but affected.

“How are you?”

He nodded, fine, fine. “I know I’m barging in.”

“Not at all.” She could see he had something on his mind. She was accustomed to doctors with time pressure. “What’s up? What can I do for you?”

He smiled himself and touched his forehead with the folded pages of single-spaced names, signaling he wasn’t sure where to begin. He exhaled.

“I’m rusty,” he said.

She raised her hands as if to say: No problem. Shoot.

“Channelopathy.”

She laughed. “That’s the last thing I’d have ever guessed would come out of your mouth.”

He sat there, awkwardly. “It’s obviously not virulent.”

“Sorry?”

“You can’t catch it.”

She shook her head. No, of course not. She gave the standard doctor caveat that she wasn’t an expert. Some people, she said, were more susceptible than others, almost certainly on a genetic basis. She told him what he already knew about ion channels.

“What is its relationship to seizure?”

“If memory serves, they are distinctive but related. Some seizure disorders, epilepsy, are caused by channelopathy. Okay, my curiosity is piqued, Lyle. What’s up?”

Her voices carried all the harmonies and dissonance of her personality: genuine interest, intensity she tried to quiet, envy that she might be missing something or that Lyle could wind up discovering or getting something she might want, however unknown or irrelevant that thing might be to her.

“I was wondering if there are any signs that we’re seeing more of this. Any papers on growing incidence of electrical disorders?”

She thought about it and whether to take him at face value on such an unusual question. “Hmm.”

“Maybe related to your phone or all the electromagnetic fields from cellular technology.”

Now her eyes widened. It was true that there had been some talk about the potential for electromagnetic radiation, EMR, as a source of cancer. Nothing had been proven. It was more conspiracy chatter at this point than anything else. And she hadn’t heard anything regarding EMR and seizure. So her eyes were wide not from curiosity or recognition but from the thought maybe Lyle had revealed himself with a kind of desperation. From her standpoint, the proper order in this room had been established.

“Are there ways to prevent or short-circuit a seizure?” Lyle asked.

“Like phenobarbital?” Her eyes went wider now as she mentioned the barbiturate. Lyle knew that some of these drugs could be used to slow or prevent seizure but that wasn’t what he was asking. Of course, he wasn’t thinking he’d give everyone in the world a barbiturate, if that even would work. Now he was startled by what she must be thinking: he might be trying to get drugs. Or maybe she was going to make it look that way, to herself, even others.

“Is everything okay, Lyle?” she asked.

He gritted his teeth. She wasn’t going to make this easy. He felt the old irritations bubble; she was playing three-level chess—one level being gamesmanship—and he didn’t want any part of it. Fatigue overtook him.

“Anyhow, thanks for your time,” he said.

Outside, he couldn’t breathe. Forces he couldn’t name grappled for control of his body and brain. He leaned against a wall with paralysis, physical, emotional, spiritual. He knew what he needed to do. He knew what he had to do. A growling sound escaped his throat. A passerby moved inches away on the sidewalk. Lyle looked at his hands white with blood loss as he held furiously to the paper with the names. It took everything not to rip it to shreds.

He put it in his pocket. He pulled out his phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Melanie.”

“Lyle? I’m right in the middle—”

“Please.”

“Lyle, okay, hold on.” He could hear Melanie cup her hand over the phone. “I need five. Can you just take ice to the guy in 210?” She withdrew her hand from the phone. “Is everything okay?”

“No.” Lyle had moved himself to the backside of the building, opposite a parking structure. Were he paying attention, he could see the water and across the bay in the direction of Melanie.

“I’m in a room. I’ve got five minutes. What’s the matter, are you sick?”

“I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“Melanie, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for—”

“Everything, all of it. It is on me.”

He heard first silence and then the sound of them crying for both of them. He invited the sound in. He closed his eyes. A minute passed.

“I love you, Mel. I will always love you.”

Sobs overcame her.

“I’m happy for you,” he said. “You have a beautiful family.”

“Thank you, Peño.”

At a café off the promenade, Lyle ignited his laptop. He pulled out the piece of paper with more than two hundred names. As the machine booted, he closed his eyes and listened to the memory of Melanie crying. He’d owed her an apology for more than three years. He probably owed her three years’ worth of apology. He owed it to himself too. At some point, whoever was to blame—him—no longer mattered. He felt the poison, the toxins, release from his body. He looked at the computer screen.

He typed the first name into Google.

Two hours later, two things were clear to Lyle. This was not a smart strategy. Second and more important: he was eager to keep going. The feeling reminded him of the old days, when no clock or skeptic deterred him. His idea had been to call up the names, look at current jobs and their pictures, which almost all of them had in some form or fashion. He’d hoped that one of them might trigger recognition. Or he’d see, or intuit, a pattern. Maybe one of them worked with Google cars. Had a Steamboat connection. Involvement with seizure research. Along those lines, there had been one former student, Dr. Mischa David, who worked at the Epilepsy Center at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Lyle spent a few minutes poking around about her and decided nothing else about her struck him.

Another woman, Jackie Badger, was unusual in that she had not followed a medical path and had, as far as he could tell, no further medical training. She worked at Google as an engineer. There had been no other information about her and the tiniest image. So he’d moved on.

Now he was only on the H’s.

He stood up and stretched. Walked outside and stared at people walking by. Most of them lost in their devices.

In the middle of a promenade stood a lone protester with a placard. It pictured a separatist with an automatic weapon. It read turncoat.

“Look up!” demanded the protester as he nearly got knocked into by a student reading his device. The student bounced off like a pinball and kept on. Lyle looked at the placard and the man holding the weapon. He had a memory flash that left him wobbling. A man with such a gun, shots fired, a body in a doorway. He clung to the image, tried to. It wavered, flickered. Shifted. A woman, standing with her phone. Clicking on it. Short hair, a hat. Flicker, flicker. Then again, two children in the backseat of a car.

Flicker. Gone.

He practically ran back to his laptop. He sat and clicked away. He called up the picture of Jackie Badger. He enlarged it. He held his breath. Dark hair, a light face. He cocked his head, tried her face on with different color hair, a hat, a worried look, a smile. He was sure he didn’t know her. Same as he didn’t feel like he’d known Eleanor when he met her at a café, but, on some level he did know her.

Just like he knew this woman.

He looked around and, outside, saw a man with a fish-looking face peering at him through the window.

Forty

Outside the café, the fish-faced man didn’t run this time. Instead, he sat on a half wall near the bike racks, arms crossed. Lyle approached him, feeling immediate irritation. The guy wreaked of smugness and self-satisfaction. A cowboy wannabe looking for a gunfight. Not just metaphorically; the guy wore a puffy windbreaker that Lyle intuited hid a gun in a back holster. There were probably five conceal-carry permits in San Francisco, and surely this guy didn’t have one. So he was some mix of stupid and dangerous and scared, or just 100 percent stupid, and yet Lyle felt undeterred.

“You’re the copilot,” Lyle said.

“The correct phrase is first officer, Dr. Martin.”

A shiver of distant recognition braced Lyle. He knew that obnoxious tone from somewhere. The man stood nearly a half foot taller than Lyle but less than that with the hunched slant of his shoulders. His eyes bulged, red tinged.

“Good timing,” Lyle said. “Is it Jeremy?”

Jerry gritted his teeth, then tried to affect a cool-guy smirk. “I’ll let you figure my name out.”

“Jerry,” Lyle said guilelessly.

“Very good, Lyle,” Jerry said. “Now what the hell is your game? You and Eleanor trying to bring me down, is that it?”

“Let’s go talk about it, Jerry. And you can tell me why you’re following me. Did Jackie send you?”

Lyle watched Jerry’s face squeeze in irritation, like he had no clue what Lyle was talking about. This guy is too stupid, Lyle thought, to fake confusion. Stupid, and dangerous. Armed.

They sat in Jerry’s red Miata on a side street and talked. The car was twenty years old, at least, and impeccable. A police scanner tucked in a compartment below the radio squawked with static and an occasional report. Lyle told much of the same story he’d told Eleanor—being on the flight, not remembering much. Jerry half listened, less interested it seemed to Lyle in figuring out what happened than in looking for flaws. Lyle patiently talked, waiting for his turn to listen, which is why he was here. Jerry didn’t seem interested, though, in sharing. So Lyle had to infer Jerry’s story, and his appearance outside the café, from his salty questions.

“So you were on the flight?”

“Yes, I told yo—”

“And you are friends with Captain Hall.”

“No.”

“But you had coffee with her.”

Lyle blew air out, wordlessly conceding the complexity. He hadn’t told Jerry about the note Eleanor found in her pocket with Lyle’s phone number. “I think I gave her my number in Steamboat,” Lyle finally said.

“You think? You think?” Jerry laughed condescendingly. He leaned back in the driver’s seat and gripped the steering wheel of the parked car. Lyle could see it for a second from Jerry’s perspective, and it looked bad.

“So how much do you remember about hacking into my e-mail?” Jerry asked.

Lyle let the question roll around in his head.

“I know who did that,” he said quietly. He was speaking mostly to himself. Some things falling into place. “Can you give me a lift to my place?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Tell me about the e-mails,” Lyle said, feeling and sounding clinical, distant.

“Fuck you. Are you even a real doctor?”

Lyle was no longer listening to this foulmouthed pedant. He said, “I think you and Eleanor and I need to meet.”

“Tell me who wrote them or I’ll fucking kill you.”

Lyle didn’t doubt it. In fact, he flashed on an elusive memory of this faux cowboy firing his weapon at close range. Then it disappeared.

“Maybe someone named Jackie Badger,” Lyle said. “Can I get a lift to my house? I’ll tell you as we go.”

Jerry, feeling good about being in the driver’s seat—literally and, in his own mind, proverbially—softened a touch. He steered the Miata in light traffic and, through his accusatory questions, started to betray what had happened. Best as Lyle could put it together, Jerry couldn’t remember what happened, either. But when he got back to San Francisco, he’d been confronted, like Eleanor, by the airlines. Unlike with Eleanor, the airline had unearthed e-mails supposedly written by Jerry that expressed nearly violent anger at his employer and saying that he would take serious measures if he wasn’t treated more fairly. The e-mails had been sent to Eleanor in the days preceding the flight. The airline discovered them looking on its own server.

“Even if I was pissed at the airline, which I am not, would I send e-mails on their server? How stupid do they think I am?”

Lyle didn’t take the bait on that one. Besides, he was focused on more things falling into place for him, and more certainty that a woman named Jackie Badger somehow was in the middle of this. Her LinkedIn profile said she worked at Google, which suggested computer expertise and, just maybe, gave her access to the driverless car that had followed Lyle and that was three car lengths back from the Miata. Lyle kept one eye on the passenger-side mirror, watching the eerie bubble. He thought he knew what to do about that. It was why he was getting a ride home.

Lyle now suspected that Jackie might’ve had the computer skills to hack into Jerry’s account. Why exactly was not clear. She was connected to Google.

Another thing, Lyle suddenly realized, Jackie Badger had the initials J.B.; same as the initials of Jennifer Babcock, the mystery woman or fictional creation that had invited him to Steamboat.

“She was on the flight,” Lyle said. “I think. Maybe.”

“How do you know that?”

“When we meet with Captain Hall, we’ll put it together.”

Outside the apartment building, they paused, caught momentarily by an urgent-sounding back-and-forth on the cop scanner. “11-54,” said a woman’s voice on the scanner. “City Hall.”

“Suspicious vehicle,” Jerry said and turned up the scanner. Then, suddenly, “11-99” and then shots. A flurry of audio traffic followed that became impossible for Lyle to follow. Jerry turned off the radio and stared at Lyle.

“What the hell do they expect to happen?” Jerry said, which also made no sense to Lyle.

“Who?”

“They’re going to take our guns. But, then again, you just can’t go shooting the good guys, either.”

Lyle realized that Jerry sounded as contradictory and, yet, certain of himself as a two-bit radio talk-show host. Then Lyle made a random connection that nearly left him laughing. He imagined that if Jerry were a virus, he’d be the common cold; mostly harmless but impossible to avoid and, if contracted during a period of frailty or bad timing, could turn to pneumonia and kill you. A simple creature, Lyle decided, but not simply dismissed.

Jerry insisted on coming upstairs with Lyle. Inside, the flight officer made a show of checking the safety on his gun, making sure Lyle could see his nine millimeter.

Lyle pulled his phone from his pocket and plugged it in at the kitchen counter where he kept his charger. He made sure the phone was on. Then he gave it a loving pat and left it there. This all went unnoticed by Jerry, which was neither here nor there. Lyle excused himself to the bathroom. He opened the medicine cabinet and fished around among the mostly empty bottles. He found the one he was looking for. He’d saved it for a rainy day, a really bad, really rainy day. That kind of day might have arrived. He put the two little white pills in his pocket.

Absent his precious device, Lyle walked back down the stairs with Jerry behind him. Lyle led him the back way out.

“I ask only one favor, Jerry.”

“You’re not in a position to—”

“Go around front and get the car and pick me up here.”

“I’m not leaving you.” Jerry smirked.

Lyle gave the first officer his wallet and keys as collateral. “I think we’re being followed,” Lyle said. “Let’s not take any chances.”

For some reason, this conspiratorial logic appealed to Jerry. For Lyle’s part, this was conspiratorial but also likely: the driverless car, he thought, was tracking him via his cell phone and, possibly, taking video of him. Who knew? Anything was possible, given the improbability of everything that had already happened.

Ten minutes later, Jerry appeared in the Miata in the alley behind Lyle’s apartment. Sweat beaded his forehead.

“If anyone was following us, he’s not now,” Jerry said. Lyle climbed in. Jerry continued. “First in my class in evasive maneuvers in a workshop three years ago put on for gun-certified first officers.”

“Would you mind turning off your phone?” Lyle asked.

“Are you kidding me? You’re giving me orders?”

“Phones can be tracked. Just a precaution.”

“Screw you,” Jerry said. But he turned off his phone.

Jerry stopped in front of a white house with a tall fence in a neighborhood Lyle couldn’t recall ever seeing. Less dense houses, bigger than flats, unattached, virtually suburban. So it was in San Francisco; the neighborhoods and architectural patches like the residents themselves, all over the map. It was called Forest Hill and aptly so, with trees and hills.

Lyle got out of the car. “This one?” He gestured to the two-story white house.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know,” Jerry said. He started walking up the hill without explanation as to why he hadn’t parked in front of the house they were evidently walking to. Maybe he was testing Lyle or maybe sneaking up on Eleanor or maybe, Lyle thought bemusedly, this was some trick he learned in first-officer-gun-carrying school. Lyle followed Jerry to the house.

Lyle felt a rush of urgency. They were running out of time and he didn’t even know what the stakes were. It was like he was bedside with a patient with mysterious symptoms, nothing he’d ever seen before, but who most assuredly would die in hours if Lyle didn’t figure it out.

“You knock,” Jerry said and nudged Lyle forward to a round-faced gray house on the corner. Stylish and deliberate, the house was not ordinary; clearly the work of someone who knew what they wanted. A window wrapped around the corner of the house, giving a glimpse inside at an equally fashionable living room. Eleanor answered the door with a mug in her hand. She blinked with surprise when she saw Lyle, but then her face took on a warm look. Then she saw Jerry. She looked alarmed.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You two?”

With as much subtlety as Lyle could channel, he shook his head. No, we’re not in cahoots.

“Hello, Eleanor,” Jerry said. “Your first officer has come to the rescue.”

Lyle watched Eleanor’s jaw tense.

“Jerry, you’re not supposed to be here.”

“Then let us in already so no one sees us.”

Eleanor gestured them in. As Jerry passed, she touched him gently on the shoulder. “Are you carrying, Jerry?”

“These are not ordinary times.”

“Why don’t you leave it in the guest room? It’s down the hall.”

“It’s not loaded.”

“It would make me feel better.”

He shrugged. He took the short hallway beside a set of stairs going up. He walked into the second door on the left. Eleanor touched Lyle’s elbow until he turned to face her. She mouthed, What is going on?

“I might actually have an idea about that,” Lyle said quietly. He caught her eye and tried to reassure her. She pursed her lips.

“I’ll make some coffee.”

Ten minutes later, midafternoon, the three of them at the kitchen counter stared at Jackie Badger’s picture on Eleanor’s laptop. Lyle watched their reactions and could imagine what they were feeling. This person looked familiar to them but only in a dreamlike way. While they stared, Lyle told them his theory. He told them that he had three reasons for suspecting this woman: he’d written Melanie a text about a woman in his class and she had been in his class; he’d been followed by a Google car and she worked at Google; when he saw her picture, it sparked something inside him.

“It’s pretty thin,” Lyle said. “I’m not even sure this is really Jackie Badger. Maybe the picture belongs to someone else.”

Eleanor had her eyes closed. She grabbed Jerry’s forearm.

“She was on the deck, Jerry.”

“What?” Lyle said.

“The flight deck. I remember her.” Eleanor still looked at Jerry.

“You do?”

“I thought I was going to die.”

She tried to describe to them what she was experiencing. She couldn’t grasp most of it, and some of it she didn’t want to say aloud. Eleanor could see this woman standing in her flight deck as Eleanor had had the feeling she was going to be joining Frank, her ex-boyfriend, true love, who had died years earlier. It wasn’t Jackie Badger that Eleanor was remembering, not exactly. It was a powerful memory of loss and the prospect of death that Eleanor was experiencing. It was pushing through the miasma of lost memory.

“What do we do about this?” she said.

Lyle told them his plan.

Forty-One

Jackie opened the door to the Lantern headquarters in Nevada. The dull hum of servers strummed through the air. Jackie held a white bag with takeout. The heavy door closed behind her. She wore a tight black cap over her short hair.

“Hello, Alex. How’re things?” She stepped inside. “I know you’re surprised to see me, just let me say something,” Jackie said. “First, at the risk of sounding insincere, it is good to see you. Really, it is. I owe you an apology. You were right, Alex, all along. So was Denny. I wasn’t being a team player. We weren’t on the same page, not aligned in our mission.”

It sounded clichéd, bordering on the glib.

“In my defense,” Jackie said, walking forward to Alex’s cubicle, “Denny never trusted me, as you rightly noted. Do you know that his distrust of me was so great, so profound, that he actually had a colleague attack me, feign an assault, a near-sexual assault. Ridiculous, right? Denny thought it would make me more beholden to him, trusting of him, so that I would follow his musty old sellout footsteps into another self-congratulatory, world-changing innovation he envisioned. Another liar, Alex, another fraud.” Jackie stopped and shook her head. “I’m rambling, I know it. I just thought I owed you some explanation.”

Alex sat in her cubicle. Her head hung to the left side. A dull smile held her catatonic face. Drool pooled beside her lip.

“Eh, who am I kidding,” Jackie said. “I don’t owe you shit.”

Jackie walked beside Alex’s swivel chair and kicked it a few feet to the left. The chair flew and Alex with it, eventually sliding off the edge and falling to the ground with her dumb, absent stare and pasted smile. Jackie reached into her pocket and pulled out a gray rectangular device that looked very much like a cell phone. “I think you’d be proud of me, Alex,” she said. “I can now change the electrical pulses on your device with this little thing. It’s a remote control—for your brain.”

She stared at Alex.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Jackie said in a happy singsong voice. “Yes, yes, yes. I did the whole Steamboat thing, and I took over Lantern, and covered my tracks, blah, blah, blah. And yes, I hacked into your computer and changed the video so that it looked like you were getting on the plane. Do you take me for an idiot? No, of course not. You took me for a genius.” She leaned over Alex. “But you treated me like I was too much of a child to trust!” She kicked the grounded woman in the ribs. Still, Alex smiled dumbly. “You took me for a weak, indecisive, helpless fool. For the last time, I might add. Jackie Badger will have plenty of time now to make smart, thoughtful decisions.

“Thanks to Lantern.”

Jackie pulled a different chair to Alex’s computer. She started clacking away. A few minutes later, she had three windows open. One belonged to the Lantern dashboard. A second showed a list of major telecommunications towers.

Then she pulled out her phone and pursed her lips. Someone was looking at her LinkedIn picture. From the IP address, she could tell that whoever was scrutinizing her picture was located in the house belonging to Captain Eleanor Hall.

“Wrinkle,” she said. “I doubt you got there on your own.”

Eleanor Hall had had nothing to connect to Jackie Badger. Most certainly, Jackie thought, this is Lyle’s doing. But Lyle’s phone was still at his apartment. No, he must have left it there and he must be with her now.

Good man, Lyle, she thought. Rising to the occasion. Me too, Jackie thought. Me too. And soon to be together. She turned to a screen that showed a map of major radio towers around the world. She enlarged the map to focus on the western United States. She hovered her cursor over Northern California until it brought up a box with information for Sutro Radio Tower. It stood tall across Twin Peaks over San Francisco. It was a radio tower, true, but many of these were in the control of Lantern partners, so she had access. Just as powerful as cell towers, but with wider distribution. She clicked to open the box and inserted a string of code from a save key.

She sipped coffee. Tedious work. She looked down at Alex, whom she’d now put into a sitting position, fixing her eyes on her phone.

“Time to get you six billion fellow travelers.”

Jackie focused her attention on a small rectangular box within the larger box she’d been interacting with. She clicked onto a new window on the monitor and called up CNN. It was continuing wall-to-wall coverage of the impending Million Gun March. It was a little less than a day away. Gawkers and participants had begun gathering at the Washington Mall. So far, just one person had been seen with a gun and had been arrested by twenty members of the National Guard in a clip being shown again and again. Ominously, a growing number of mobile homes had streamed into the capital. Permitted gun owners in their “homes.” Would they march?

Jackie clicked away and then returned to the small rectangular box on the Lantern dashboard, inserting her cursor on a command line. She typed: 18:00, and then hit enter.

17:59:59 it read. Seventeen hours and fifty-nine minutes.

17:59:58

One day and counting. Lots of work to do. She clicked on the Mount Wilson radio tower in Los Angeles. The easier stuff she’d save until later, using the back door she’d created into the major telecom providers, like Verizon and Comcast, China Telecom, Vodafone, Nippon Telegraph, and on. New modems and routers for everyone or most people around the globe. All with the power to hit the human pause button.

17:59:56

17:59:55

17:59:54

Forty-Two

With Jerry behind the wheel of the Miata, Eleanor in the passenger seat, and Lyle squeezed painfully into what passed for a backseat, the threesome stared at a greenish-brown-colored flat located near the western edge of San Francisco, not far from the beach. Salty wet air clung to these attached flats, the colors so worn they took on the dull flavor of the fog itself.

“You think she’s in there?” Eleanor asked.

Lyle didn’t answer. His eyes settled on a shaggy-looking mat lying before the front door. Something elevated the mat slightly, a box or package hidden beneath. Lyle pushed his way out of the Miata.

Jerry reached around and felt for his gun. Watching Lyle wander off without warning reminded Jerry of something, a memory he couldn’t quite grasp. “I don’t trust this guy for a second, Eleanor.”

She exhaled loudly, a tacit agreement, but not a direct confirmation. She didn’t want to give Jerry permission to do anything stupid. They watched Lyle knock on the door. Wait, knock again. Lean down and look and move the mat aside with his toe and stare at what looked to be a package. Lyle seemed satisfied and loped back to the car.

“Package postmarked a week ago,” he said. “I don’t think anyone is around.”

“Who’s the package addressed to?”

“Jackie Badger,” Lyle said.

They’d found the address in minutes with the help of a friend of Jerry’s in the police department. They also discovered Jackie worked on Google’s campus in Mountain View, at least that’s what it said on a CV they found online. But they figured they’d never get in there and Lyle’s plan had been to try to visit her place while she was gone.

Now, standing here, he thought aloud, “We could call the police, or wait until night to see if she comes back. Or…” He paused. “We could see about the back. There’s a small yard, accessible by an alley. Looks pretty desolate back there, so if there’s a back door…” He let it hang there, stared at the house. “In any case, it’s, what, four fifteen, so we don’t have long before—”

His sentence was interrupted by Jerry opening his door. He stood and straightened his dark blue windbreaker.

“I got this,” he said. “You two relax.”

He walked purposefully to the street corner. Lyle felt a tug of conscience and turned to see it was being beamed at him by Eleanor. She stared at Lyle and he shook his head, knowing exactly what he’d done. It wasn’t quite condemnation, though.

“Let’s use the powers of the gun for good,” he said.

“Watch out or it will turn on you.”

A few minutes later, the front door opened. Jerry beckoned them inside. Lyle looked around the street and didn’t see so much as a mail truck. It was still shy of quitting time. He and Eleanor stepped out of the fog. Jerry closed the door behind them.

“What did you do?” Eleanor asked.

“Piece of cake. Some stuff I learned doing a hotshot-firefighting weekend training. I’ll spare you the gory details.” Lyle thought it condescending but mostly was focused on the musty smell in this classic midcentury San Francisco flat. A narrow hallway led to a bathroom and two bedrooms in the back. Halfway down the hallway, a doorway led to the kitchen and to the right of the front door, a living room and dining room with creaky wooden floors. The place looked little lived in. Lyle closed his eyes and inhaled. He took in humidity that had seeped into these walls, the low-level mold. He winced; virus could take root here. That wasn’t today’s business. They searched the house, first with great care, and then with more urgency when nothing of relevance, or even mild interest, revealed itself. Other than that the outdated and Spartan decor—an old futon couch in the front room, a garage-sale dining-room table, a beanbag chair, a refrigerator with a pizza magnet holding a sloppily written shopping list and little inside—reminded him very much of his own surroundings and habits. It told him that Jackie Badger focused on things inside her head, not the external. Know your virus, he thought, as he descended wooden stairs from the back of the kitchen to, presumably, the garage. Halfway down, he heard: “Dr. Martin… Lyle.”

It was Eleanor, calling from the bedroom. Lyle found the airline captain looking at a photograph. Of Lyle. He was standing at the café near his house, holding his bicycle, about to mount it. It looked like the photo had been taken by a long lens.

“It was tucked in behind that picture,” Eleanor said. She gestured to a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, now hung askew after Eleanor had delved behind it. She looked at the picture. “I wonder why she’s collecting photos of people who look bewildered,” she teased lightly.

Jerry stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. “You’ve never been here?” he asked Lyle pointedly.

“Who even prints pictures anymore?”

Lyle took Eleanor’s meaning: everyone keeps their photos online.

“Someone who wants you to find it,” he muttered. “Everyone’s phone is off, right?” he said just a touch less absently.

Lyle looked up to find Jerry staring at him. “Now why would she leave us the photo, huh? You’ve got a lot of strange answers, pal. Maybe you’re trying to throw us off the scent.”

“Jerry…”

The sound of their back-and-forth reminded Lyle, somehow, of Steamboat. “There’s going to be more,” Lyle said obliquely. He walked out of the room and into the second bedroom next door. It served as an office. Now, all tenderness or care was gone from Lyle’s search. He swept things around on the desk, pulled out books from the shelf. He pawed through pockets in the two jackets hung in the closet and shuffled through plastic cartons holding files and folders. On the desk, he stared at a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. It was from four days earlier. The headline on the lead story referred to the upcoming march on Washington. It was tomorrow, Lyle realized.

He stood to find Eleanor and Jerry looking at him. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. He thought about the note on his fridge, about how this person said she’d met her match. He brushed past them, through the linoleum and bad tile kitchen, down the stairs to a dark, damp garage. At the bottom, he found a string hanging from the low ceiling and pulled it to click on a lightbulb. It provided dim light but enough to make out a garage converted into storage space, no car, boxes, junk, a bicycle and a treadmill. Then he saw the flies. Bingo.

Lyle sidestepped crud until he got to the recycling, trash, and compost bins near the front of the garage where the bugs hovered. They told him these bins hadn’t been attended recently. Then he opened the compost and saw it was more foul than he thought. Inside, a bird, half eaten away by bacteria, maggots, and flies. He withdrew from the bacteria scent and closed the green lid. The trash held similarly little interest, as he poked through what looked like the detritus of a Dustbuster, fluff and dust bunnies. He heave-dragged the blue recycling bin over the piles and stacks until he came back to the stairs and the lightbulb above. Jerry and Eleanor stood there speechlessly watching. He tipped the tall bin and dumped. Half a foot of junk mail and assorted papers slipped out. Lyle picked through it. He paused on a scrap, held it close to his face, put it on the stair for further examination. Leafed some more, tossed most of it aside. Found another small scrap and scrutinized it. Then picked up the first scrap.

He started looking again with greater intensity.

“Lyle,” Eleanor said.

Lyle didn’t answer and she couldn’t be sure he even heard her, so lost was he.

“Hey, so-called doctor, what’s the deal?” Jerry said.

Lyle now looked intently at another sheet of paper culled from the pile. He stood and whisked right between the two flummoxed pilots and up the stairs he went, into the kitchen to the fridge. He pulled off the shopping list held by the pizza magnet—a magnet that matched his own exactly—and opened the sheet of paper, which had been folded in quarters. Inside was a grainy image of a mouse. It looked to have been printed in black and white on a not-very-fancy printer. Beneath the picture, a caption that read: “The deer mouse is three to four inches long with a brown back and a white stomach.”

Lyle closed his eyes and rocked on his feet, thinking. Then, suddenly, he walked purposely toward the door.

“Hey!” Jerry said.

Lyle, lost in thought, kept walking. Eleanor hustled behind him. She took his arm and gently spun him around. “Hello, Earth to Dr. Martin. What’s up?”

He looked up, seeming surprised he had company.

“I know where she is.”

Forty-Three

Lyle kept walking. Eleanor wondered if he was muttering to himself. She resisted the urge to look back at Jerry because she didn’t want to encourage his skepticism. Truly, though, she felt some of it herself. She hustled up behind Lyle and walked next to him, hearing the sound behind her of Jerry shutting the door.

“You ever fly a plane, Dr. Martin?”

“What? Um, no.” He kept toward the car.

“It takes all the concentration in the world. Still, though, you have to pause now and again and communicate to the passengers, y’know, explain to them what’s happening.”

“Uh-huh.” He kept walking.

“Or they’ll storm the flight deck and tear you limb from limb. Unless, of course, you’ve given them Wi-Fi. Then they’ll be so distracted you can fly into the ocean.”

Lyle laughed. “Fair enough.” He opened the door and climbed into the back.

“Somebody tell me what the hell is going on,” Jerry said, standing with arms crossed in irritation. “Or we’re not going anywhere, capiche?”

Eleanor shot him a look.

“Give me a break and quit the lovebird crap,” Jerry said.

She held her arms up, like What the hell, where did that come from?

“Flight plan calls for Nevada,” Lyle said.

Jerry shook his head in disbelief.

“So-so start. This is the part where you need to communicate,” Eleanor said.

She climbed into the passenger seat and Jerry took the wheel. He put up the top of the sports car and Lyle explained what he’d found.

In the recycling bin were several receipts that caught his eye. He fanned four of them in his hand. One was a restaurant, another for an electric-car charging station, and a third for a hotel. The fourth was for a place called “Winter Place,” but left no other evidence what it was. The restaurant and charging station had come from three months earlier, well prior to the Steamboat flight. The Days Inn hotel was from the week before.

All of them had the 702 area code. The hotel had an address in “Hawthorne, Nev.”

“How do you know she’s there now? Why wouldn’t she be at work?”

“Fair question and easy enough to check. We can call Google,” Lyle said. “She won’t be there. She’s here,” he mused, and it sounded very much like he was talking to himself or the receipts. He realized it and looked up. He explained his reasoning. The receipts were from very different time periods. That wasn’t necessarily a big deal—after all, Jackie might have dumped receipts together over time and then cleaned her office and recycled them at one time. But Lyle suspected it was a clue for two reasons. One was that a bird had been left in the compost. This, Lyle thought, had been designed to draw flies and to attract their attention.

“To the compost? Give me a break,” Jerry said.

“I agree it sounds thin,” the pilot said.

“Or just dumb luck,” Lyle said with a shrug.

“Keep going.”

He showed the mouse picture and told them that the deer mouse had become a particularly nagging source of hantavirus.

“It’s a symbol of sorts, something any immunologist would recognize,” Lyle said. “Comes from Nevada. I think she was giving another gentle reminder, and it was held on the refrigerator with the same magnet I’ve got—the one where my own note disappeared.” He’d already told them that story.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Jerry. “And you’re telling me you’ve never met her.”

“So, like, she’s leaving clues?” Eleanor ignored Jerry. “Why in the world would she do that? Why not just leave a note saying where she is?”

Lyle looked blankly at Eleanor. He had no answer for her.

“Fair enough,” Lyle said. His logic did sound thin. “We can call the hotel in Nevada and see if she’s checked in there.”

“Well now, there’s a sane thought,” Jerry muttered. “Except that you’ve made us all turn off our phones.”

With about as much sense of cohesion as the United States Congress, they drove to a nearby café and Eleanor asked a man if she might borrow his phone because she’d lost hers and needed to call a friend. No biggie, the guy said. She looked at the number on the receipt for the Days Inn.

She asked for Jackie Badger’s room.

“Connecting you now to 106,” the woman said.

Eleanor hung up.

Jackie’s phone rang. She looked down and recognized the number.

“Ms. Badger?”

“This is she.”

“Hi, it’s Becky from the Days Inn.”

“Hi, Becky.”

“You asked me to call you if anyone called to ask for you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Someone called just a few minutes ago.”

“Asking for me.”

“Right. I told them what you said to.”

“Becky, well done. Was it a man or a woman?”

“Woman’s voice.”

Jackie winced and her eye twitched. “Thank you, Becky,” she managed.

“You’re welcome. Thank you for the new iPad and a new iPhone. I don’t know what to say. I’ve never gotten anything like this before in my life.”

“My pleasure. I take care of the people who take care of me.”

“Is there anything else you need, Ms. Badger?”

“No, Becky. I’m good. Just keep me posted.”

“Yes, ma’am. And, um, ma’am—”

“Jackie is fine.”

“Yes, Jackie. You want me to do the other thing, too?”

“Yep, just like we talked about. Thank you, Becky.” She hung up. She sighed. It had been a long time without sleep, and hard work. She’d moved her operation downstairs into one of the exam rooms they had used for study subjects. It had entailed moving a computer and two monitors. The gadgets sat on a table, Jackie in the swivel desk chair, and Alex lying on her side, dumb smile on her face. Jackie liked the idea of having her there, a mascot. Down here, at least on the scientists’ side of the room, it was protected from the electromagnetic field. Not so much on the other side, where the study subjects used to sit. An empty chair was there and, as Jackie looked at it, she sure hoped she’d eventually have Lyle on her side and that she wouldn’t have to put him in that chair.

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.

They pulled on the highway again. Trucks hummed and rattled by with decreasing frequency on the nearby highway. Lyle, chewing an In-N-Out burger, Eleanor sipping her soda, Jerry spooning handfuls of fries.

“Look,” Eleanor said. She gestured outside the front of the car. A shooting star finished its descent and disappeared. “Remind you of anything?” she asked Jerry.

He laughed. “Atlanta.”

“Jesus, if they had known…”

Lyle heard the friendship between them and wondered why he ever had doubted it was there. After another quiet minute, Jerry asked Eleanor: “Are you thinking of Frank?”

She shook her head. “Not really.”

She turned around and glanced at Lyle. “You want to hear a funny story?”

“Absolutely.”

She told Lyle about the time that she and Jerry had been at a continuing education training at Delta headquarters in Atlanta. They’d been teamed up for years and just hated this nonsense. When they were live-training new landing gear, they’d been asked to pause in a holding pattern when Jerry had seen a shooting star. He pulled out this new time-lapse feature on his iPhone and they’d started playing around with it. They hadn’t realized that they’d just missed altogether the second turn in the holding pattern. They looked up when the radio squawked asking what the hell they were doing flying directly at the radio tower.

In the front seat of the Miata, Jerry was laughing. “The best part was that I’d gotten the camera turned around so instead of snapping the shooting star—”

“He took a picture of me with an oh-shit-radio-tower look on my face,” Eleanor completed his thought. “Or maybe the best part was when you told the guy in the radio tower that we aimed for the radio tower to punish him for putting veterans into a holding pattern.” She turned to Lyle. “Gives you all the confidence in the world in your flight officers, does it not, Dr. Martin?”

Lyle smiled. His mind was half in the conversation and half in the comment Jerry had made earlier about someone named Frank. Lyle wondered if that was Eleanor’s boyfriend or husband, or ex. In any case, it was someone who she’d be reminded of by a shooting star.

“Less than two hours,” Jerry said.

“I’m beat,” Eleanor said. She put her head on the window.

No one spoke for nearly an hour. Lyle even dozed. Jerry tuned the radio to the only station he could find in the rural track, a talk show called “The Fringe,” where a guy who declared he was broadcasting from an “undisclosed basement location” speculated that the Million Gun March on Capitol Hill was easily understandable as the work of extraterrestrials. Aliens, the talk-show host said, had impregnated us with Civil War instincts so we’d wipe each other out and they’d harvest our organs.

Lyle dipped in and out of sleep. He woke up and rubbed his eyes. He listened to the radio, the voice coming in and out, static sometimes. It was telling him something. Radio, static, frequencies, epilepsy, channelopathy.

They saw the first sign of Hawthorne. It was just the other side of midnight. “Heading due east,” Jerry said. “Not much of a tailwind.” He sounded nervous. Eleanor was still asleep. The horizon lurked deep dark. If there was a town up ahead, it wasn’t much of one. A distant, ambient light clung low to the ground, far away. Maybe some hotels or restaurants a few miles off. Then, a few miles later, something odd happened. The distant light flickered just at the moment the radio turned to static. Jerry instinctively reached for the dial and spun it, trying to regain the station, and got more static. All across the dial.

“Was that…” Lyle started. “That was odd, right?”

“Do you remember when we were landing?” Jerry said to Eleanor. “Hmm,” she said, groggily.

“Landing?” asked Lyle.

“In Steamboat.”

“Was there an electrical issue—when we landed?” Lyle asked.

“I think so,” Jerry said. “I feel like…”

“Turn off the radio,” Lyle suddenly commanded.

“Hold on, slow down there, Dr. Cowboy,” Jerry said. He was back to that officious tone. But he turned off the radio. He sensed they’d been through something like this before. “Wake up, Captain,” he said. “We’re almost there.” He shook her leg. She was way out of it. “I don’t like this place. No more chickenshit stuff.”

For a second, Jerry let go of the wheel and the car swerved. He twisted in the driver’s seat and, with impressive flexibility, removed the nine millimeter from the holster behind him. He set the weapon in his lap. Lyle tried not to laugh. Who or what was he going to shoot? The radio?

It all struck Lyle as familiar, one of those Steamboat flashes. Jerry with a gun and this was going to end badly.

Desolation defined the weigh station at the Nevada border. As they approached, two eighteen-wheelers parked on the right side of the road looked all but abandoned. A toll-like plaza hung over the highway and funneled drivers into booths. All booth lanes were closed but the one on the far right where Jerry pulled the Miata. A dark figure loomed, which Lyle thought odd. Why monitor a border when there was no toll, and in the middle of the night?

“Jerry, put away the…” Lyle said.

It was too late. Jerry had pulled into the lane and slowed to the booth. He’d forgotten to holster or hide the semiautomatic and now it lay there in the middle compartment. The worst thing he could do now would be to draw attention to it. Wasn’t this an open-carry state? In the booth, a woman wearing a hoodie, frizzy hair pouring out the sides, looked blankly at them, all bureaucrat.

“Evening,” Jerry said.

Lyle noticed a small TV in front of her. “Are you watching static?” he blurted.

She looked at her TV and before she could look back, Lyle tossed a blanket over the gun.

“Somethin’ weird with the signal all of a sudden,” the woman said. She looked over the car again, seemed to have noticed that there was a change but couldn’t place it or wasn’t letting on.

“What brings you to Nevada?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” Jerry said. “Is this typical? I’ve never been stopped at a state border before. We’re Delta pilots heading to a training.”

The woman’s eyes settled on Lyle’s jacket covering the gun and quickly moved off them. The butt stuck out.

“Just a precaution. With all the stuff taking place in Washington and we’ve got a military base here, as you probably know if you’re pilots,” the woman said. “Where did you say you were training?”

Jerry reached for his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He extracted a card and held it up to her. “If there’s nothing else, we’ll be on our way…” He looked at her name tag. “Marsha.”

“Okay,” she said. But she looked skeptical. Lyle suspected she was told to be on the lookout for anything remotely suspicious, particularly if there was a military base located here. Even setting aside whatever the hell Jackie was up to, this world seemed to be boiling with tension.

Jerry hit the accelerator. Lyle looked over his shoulder and it sure looked to him like she picked up the phone.

“What the hell were you doing?” Jerry barked at Lyle. “I have a permit. You made it look like we’re doing something wrong.” He didn’t add the words you idiot, but his tone captured the sentiment. “Wake up, Captain.” He shook her leg again. She was really out. Was there something wrong with her?

From the weigh station, a car pulled out, now about a hundred yards behind them. Jerry stepped on it. So did the vehicle in the rearview mirror. In the dark, it was hard to tell if it was a cop car, though it stood to reason.

“I’ve never heard of a weigh station used for that purpose.”

“Maybe it’s Jackie Badger’s doing,” Lyle mused aloud.

“These are not ordinary times,” Jerry said dismissively. “Assholes with guns and now the government using that as an excuse to take away our rights. Freaking liberals couldn’t wait to institute martial law. Over my goddamned dead body.”

“You ever notice how often you contradict yourself on this subject, Jerry.”

“What’s wrong with Eleanor?” Jerry spat back at Lyle. “Captain, wake up.”

Behind them, red lights started spinning on the top of the cop car that was now a little more than fifty yards behind.

Ahead, in the dead of night, Hawthorne loomed. Jerry punched the accelerator.

Forty-Five

“Hey, Jerry…”

Jerry ignored Lyle and kept his foot to the floor.

“Jerry, this is no big deal. You’re a first officer with a permit to carry. Just show them the permit and we’ll be done with it.”

“And I crossed the border from a state that’s not open-carry. This all would have been easier before you put us all in harm’s way.”

“So just say I covered the gun by accident. I’ll tell them. We really don’t need to overreact to this. It’ll make it worse.”

Jerry ignored him and pulled a sharp right. They sped down an off ramp and fishtailed as Jerry took a ninety-degree left beneath the overpass, barely hitting the brakes. Lyle white-knuckled his pants legs. The Miata zoomed beneath the highway and emerged on the other side, the tiny town of Hawthorne suddenly looming in front of them. Jerry gunned it again on the empty, quiet, dark road that must’ve passed for Main Street. It cut through gas stations and fast-food joints and then modest paved tributaries.

Behind, Lyle could see the police car just getting off the highway. The cop must be taking it cautiously, he thought, recognizing there wasn’t much place for Jerry to go. And, besides, a wise cop would want no one hurt. Jerry took a quick right and then another and then screeched to a stop. It was a deft move, Lyle realized; the policeman would’ve been unable to see which turns they’d taken. So they were, in effect, temporarily hidden.

“Go get her, Dr. Martin.”

“Who?”

Lyle looked where Jerry was pointing. He had landed them in the parking lot of the Days Inn.

“Room 106,” Jerry said. He shook the pilot. “Wake up, Eleanor.”

Lyle took in the low-slung, low-budget motel. Or maybe it was high budget for these parts, nice as it got. A postage-stamp-size swimming pool surrounded by a metal fence took up a spot near the rooms in the center of the U-shaped complex. Not a single light shone in any room. But to the left, opposite the side of the lot where Jerry had parked, light shone from a small office. A sign blinked vacancy.

Jerry quietly shoved an ammunition clip into the nine millimeter. He ejected it and shoved it in again, double-checking. There was no other sound. They must have lost the police car, which probably was patrolling nearby, looking down streets and alleys.

“Draw her out,” Jerry said quietly. “That’s the plan.”

Lyle tried to hear the words and not the obnoxious tone. Did Jerry have a point? Lure Jackie from room 106 and then put a bullet in her? Of course that was too rash.

“I don’t think it’s going to be that simple. Let’s wait another minute to make sure that cop doesn’t swing by.”

Jerry stared at Eleanor. A touch of drool gathered by her lips. “We need to get her to a doctor,” he said. “A real doctor.”

Just then, they heard a sound and a car moved on the street, slowly. A searchlight swept the lot, narrowly missing them. The car passed. Lyle pushed the seat forward to get a look at Eleanor. He shook her and she lolled a bit and moaned. Lyle stepped out of the Miata. He looked across the lot and saw inside the little office. The woman looking their direction talked on the phone and quickly looked away when she saw Lyle’s gaze.

“I think you should come with me,” Lyle blurted. “Let’s bring her.”

Jerry burst out with a bitter laugh. He caught himself for making too much noise and then just shook his head. “You think we’re walking into that trap with you? Are you even paying attention to what you observed earlier? Jackie, or whatever her name is, she wants us to walk into that room. That’s why she had the room number given to us.”

Lyle let the words sink in. He tended to agree with Jerry. This was a trap.

“I think you should come with me,” he repeated.

“Oh, okay, Dr. Martin,” Jerry said as sarcastically as he could muster.

Lyle closed his eyes and looked for a reason. He said, “I’m not sure why. Just a gut feeling.”

It was unfolding as he’d expected, and now he was starting to chicken out of his plan. It was such a risk. He steeled himself.

“Suit yourself,” Lyle said.

“Smartest thing you’ve said since we met.” Jerry felt the need to pile on. “I’m going to find a medical clinic. Or a diner. Captain needs a cup of coffee.”

Lyle walked to the motel room door just in front of number 102. Lyle moved along the outer walkway. He could feel his cortisol levels—his fight-or-flight neurochemicals—through the roof. They kept his eyes and ears at superheightened levels. It was his hearing he found himself focused on. Something told him to prepare for a buzz or hum, a radio burst, an electrical surge.

He passed an ice and vending machine and stood in front of room 106. He knocked.

No answer.

Knock, knock.

No answer.

Lyle put his hand on the knob. He heard a screeching sound behind him. He turned to see a police car, lights spinning, pulled on to the street behind him. An officer stepped out of the car. He had his hand on his holster.

Jerry opened the driver’s-side door. The officer withdrew his weapon and raised it.

“Drop the gun, Officer,” Jerry said. “I’ve got a permit. It’s okay.”

“You drop the gun, sir. Right now. Put your hands in the air.”

Instead of dropping the gun, Jerry crouched, putting him largely behind the Miata. Lyle could see the shattering of fragile trust, the proverbial fear of the other guy. Each side reverting to fear and aggression. He turned the knob on room 106 and pushed open the door. He blinked with surprise.

He saw the odd walls. Long metal or aluminum sheets covered them. They covered the window, hidden from view from the outside by the darkened curtains. It was like the entire inside was wallpapered in this odd metal covering.

“Put the gun down!” the officer shouted. “Step from behind the vehicle!”

Lyle stared at the metal-colored walls.

A shot rang out.

Forty-Six

Another shot. Lyle took a tentative step inside. “Down,” Jerry screamed. It wasn’t clear who he was talking to. Lyle stared at the room, captivated. Calculating, things falling into place. He picked up movement in his periphery. Bang, bang, more shots. A punctured tire hissed.

“Jerry! In here!”

Jerry said something, like, “I got this.”

Lyle’s head spun with information, ideas. He hardly heard the commotion now. Suddenly, he muttered, “Trap, yes a trap,” Lyle muttered.

He shut himself inside, dulling the noise. He looked at the walls, and another oddity: a clock on the bedside table blinking with rapidly changing numbers. Now there was no sound from outside whatsoever.

Suddenly, a high-pitched sound pierced the air. Lyle resisted the urge to cover his ears, during the thirty seconds before the sound passed. He turned around and saw the door.

He saw the bodies.

Jackie, tight jawed, stared at the video feed streaming on a second monitor she’d set up on her desk. The video showed a dark hotel room, number 106. Lyle stood at the doorway, back to her. She looked down at the desk. It was covered with papers and take-out food containers. It smelled. Didn’t bother her at all, not when she felt such elation. He’d fallen right into it, or, more likely, he’d gotten her clue and acted on it. Either way, all according to plan. Lyle alive and well, and Hawthorne frozen around him.

She cleared her throat. There was a bit more to do before the last of the clock counted down. And she still needed Lyle to show up to celebrate with her. He’d figure it out, and be so grateful for the awakening, his rebirth. He owed it all to her. And in this new world, there would be time to think and process, slow down, take their sweet time to share the peace.

Lyle walked outside and looked down at Jerry. He lay on his back, his gun hand palm up to the right, nine millimeter spilled out of it. His head tilted sideways, and on his face he wore a dumb-looking smile.

Twenty yards away, near one of the motel’s metal support poles that the police officer had hidden behind, the man lay on the ground. He looked much like Jerry. Then another body near the door of the motel; it was the woman who had been behind the desk, her iPad near her feet. She must’ve come outside when the shooting started.

Eleanor’s head lolled back in the passenger seat. Lyle cringed. “I’m sorry, Captain,” he said quietly. “It’s the only way.”

Lyle returned to Jerry and knelt beside the fallen flight officer and felt the carotid for a pulse. He pulled back an eyelid and saw that the pupils looked, at first, to be dilated. Then Lyle really focused and noticed the pupils moving so rapidly as to appear fixed.

Just like Steamboat. The syndrome. The whole town must be like this. He carried Jerry into 106 and laid him on the bed. He did the same for Eleanor so the pair were side by side. He covered them with the flower comforter to keep them warm. He shut the door and studied the room and its oddities. First, the clock. It wasn’t the usual motel room clock. It looked similar, but the numbers were going backward and rapidly so.

4:26:27

4:26:26

4:26:25

Counting down.

Until what?

He shuddered at the possibilities. The rest of the country? The world? Lyle’s own fate? All of the above?

He focused his attention at the crisp green apple next to the clock. There was a bite out of the apple with a light sheen around the edges. Lip gloss, maybe. The part where the bite had been taken was turning brown. It had been here awhile.

Lyle stood and ran his hand along the metal-looking wallpaper. It was held in place by nails, closely spaced but inexpertly placed, probably with a nail gun. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble. Jackie had gone to a lot of trouble. She had protected this place from the syndrome. He circled slowly, looking in each corner, knowing he was being told something and wasn’t sure what it was. How to understand Jackie Badger, this virus? He looked back at the apple.

What does an apple symbolize?

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” he murmured. No, that was too clever by half. “Eden. The apple, the snake, Eve and Adam,” he said. “Some Eden.”

He scanned the room, struck by revelation. There must be a camera in here. Of course; it’s how Jackie knew to trigger the syndrome outside this room. She was watching. On some level, he realized he’d known it all along. Subconsciously, it’s why he set these bodies on the bed, so Jackie could see her success. Now Lyle would take further advantage of Jackie’s digital presence here, her watchful eye. It was time to turn up the heat on this madwoman.

Lyle walked to the right side of the bed. He leaned close to Eleanor and he whispered, “I’m very sorry, Captain Hall. No violation intended.” He leaned down and swallowed and then kissed Eleanor gently on the cheek. He held his lips there.

It might even draw her out. It was a similar analysis he felt like he’d been through before in the snowy Steamboat night.

He withdrew from Eleanor. He turned and walked from the room.

“Nicely played,” Jackie said, watching Lyle separate from Eleanor. Her words didn’t match the sneer on her face. Lyle was right. She was furious. “Fucking bitch,” she muttered. “Alex, that captain is a hideous siren, you know that?

“Hey, you hideous siren, how do you expect to please your man when you’re locked in paralysis. You’ve been paused, bitch.”

She took a deep breath. Okay, no biggie. Maybe Lyle was just messing with her, giving her his best match. He probably didn’t care about this woman. Remember who you’re dealing with, she told herself; it’s Dr. Lyle Martin, the best of the best, her future and eternal playmate. He was just playing.

She looked at the computer windows on her monitors. They showed her that much of what had needed doing was already done. Virtually the whole world was teed up, the telecommunications infrastructure ready to send paralyzing bursts. The final commands had been keyed in. Only she knew the password to turn it off. So it was just a matter of time.

4:22:19

4:22:18

“Alex, can you hold down the fort for me? I have to grab something from the car.”

Jackie pulled on a dark knit cap. It had odd-looking gold-colored lines woven into the sides. These would, in theory, protect her from any inadvertent surges in electromagnetic frequencies. There shouldn’t be any. She turned it all off now that she held the town in stasis. But it never hurt to be careful. That’s why she’d parked the whole operation in this room downstairs, isolated from the surges bombarding the rest of the world. It was a nice little bunker. As she shut the door, it made her a touch nervous to leave the comfort and safety of this place. But the initial surge was finished, so she should be just fine, just as she had been in Steamboat.

Besides, she was too close to starting this world over to let it be screwed up by Captain Hall. It was exhilarating, in a way, being involved in this game with Lyle. He was searching for her, not merely physically, but searching to understand her, and she was searching for him. Oh, to see and be seen.

Upstairs and outside, she let herself into her Tesla. She glanced in the glove box and withdrew mace and a Taser.

Forty-Seven

Lyle searched the motel room one last time for clues, anything at all that might tell him what to do next. He found nothing. It had been scraped clean other than the apple and countdown clock. He left the room, then carried the woman who had fallen outside to the motel office and put her on a couch. Her name tag read becky. Her laptop, still running, displayed a Gwen Stefani YouTube video on a loop.

Lyle looked around the office, scoured the front desk for some clue or insight. Not a ton to offer. Nothing telltale in Becky’s backpack or the little zip pack on the back of her bicycle that leaned against the couch. No clue planted on the coffee table.

“Ah,” Lyle said. On the tiny screen of the cordless phone, he could see the most recent calls in and out and when they’d taken place. It appeared that Becky had placed two calls right about the time that they’d first arrived at the motel. Both were to a phone number in the 415 area code. Lyle jotted down the number. He took Becky’s cell phone, a spanking new iPhone. He made sure the phone was turned on.

He picked up the landline and discovered a dial tone but also static. It was half working. He dialed 911. More static. The communications system was down here.

On the counter, on a piece of scrap paper, Becky had made a doodle, a little drawing. It was quite impressive. It was a pencil sketch of a woman. It was her, Jackie.

Lyle found a phone book and the address for a medical clinic, the closest thing here to a hospital. It was only a few blocks away. A few minutes later, he’d pulled out of the Days Inn lot in the Miata. Jerry was in the backseat, covered in the flower bed comforter, so he wouldn’t fall off the seat. Eleanor was belted into the front seat, a pillow behind her head.

At first blush, this town at two thirty in the morning looked no different from any other early morning at this time. Dead quiet. Behind the clinic counter, the all-night nurse, comatose, had her face planted on her iPad. Could Lyle read her mind, he’d have seen it delighted by a video of her son hitting a line drive up the middle in his recent Little League game. Inside her head, it was on constant loop.

Lyle let himself into the rooms behind the counter and found the medical supplies. He took a saline pouch and a needle kit and some first aid stuff and returned to the Miata. If need be, the hydration system could be used to sustain someone left in a stasis state. He found smelling salts. He was walking to the car when he ran back in and found the defibrillator. He stood with it staring at Jerry and Eleanor. Then he decided it would do more harm than good. He couldn’t just start experimenting.

Having gotten this far, Lyle felt totally helpless. How the hell was he going to reverse this condition? How was he going to stop whatever was going to happen in four hours and change?

Jackie must have left him a clue. What was it?

He started driving, thinking he might go look for help. He wound up back at the weigh station where they’d been questioned on the way in. The woman in the booth had fallen to the side, propped up against the glass, eerily, her eyes still pointed at her phone, which sat on her open palm on the desk. On the screen, a frozen shot of a regular gag from a late-night show where an adorable animated dog spewed expletives.

Lyle wondered if it made sense to keep driving, try to get help. How long would he have to go to find someone?

“Why here? Why Hawthorne?” he asked aloud. Then he answered his question: “She’s here and her operation is here. She brought us here.”

Lyle reached into his back pocket and he looked at the receipts he’d pulled from Jackie’s recycling bin. One was for the hotel, where they’d been. Another from a diner. Another from what looked like some outdoor store. Then a receipt for an electric-car charging station, and one from a 7-Eleven. Lyle looked at all of them. He looked at the receipts again. What was nagging at him?

The 7-Eleven receipt.

It was a receipt for a comb and steel wool.

What bell did that ring?

Steamboat again. Hadn’t he tried to create static electricity using items like these?

Had this woman bought the same thing? Or was she toying with him, sending him these little in-jokes, clues. He remembered seeing the 7-Eleven not far from the motel. He gunned the Miata, muttering to himself, becoming more aware of the little signs of a world at a standstill: lights flickering, the eerie sign of a woman at a gas pump, slumped beside her car, a dog wandering the street. At the 7-Eleven, Lyle walked inside, causing a bell to jingle at the door. This did nothing to stir the attention of the guy sitting behind the counter, face-planted on his iPad. Inside his head played a highly amusing video loop of a famous actress being caught on camera stealing a purse from a major department store. The man smiled. So hilarious.

Lyle went to the freezer and took out some ice. He returned and laid the man on the floor, placing his jacket beneath his head and gently lifting his head to put the ice under his neck. The cold would help slow the man’s metabolism and retain his brain function. Lyle walked to the section with personal supplies, like aspirin and toothpaste and combs. He leafed through the $1.99 combs. Would Jackie be leaving him a clue? Nothing. He went to the cleaning supplies and found the steel wool. A few pieces hung next to the sponges. He leafed through them for anything unusual. Nothing. Frustrated, he threw them to the ground. He walked to the corner of the store and he looked up at the camera that scoped the inside of the place.

“What do you want, Jackie?” He spread his arms out to the sides. “Where are you?”

He couldn’t be sure she was watching. He couldn’t be sure she wasn’t. He pulled out Becky’s phone, thought about dialing the phone number he’d found in the motel office. He strongly suspected he’d get Jackie. He stared at the phone.

Then he stared at the receipts again.

He ran back to the Miata and drove two blocks away to the diner. Another all-night place. Another employee slumped on the counter. Coffee spilled everyplace, when the poor chump fell over on the shitty, ancient counter sipping coffee and watching a fishing tutorial on his phone. Lyle looked again at the receipt that had caught his attention. It said: Delivery.

Jackie had gotten delivery from this place. Lyle started pulling out drawers and looking frantically for a ledger of take-out orders, or customers. It didn’t take long to find it. There were several recent delivery orders for J.B. at Google, and an address listed in scrawl. It was 85209 Deer Valley Road.

In a drawer under the register, Lyle found an old-school atlas with detailed maps of the local surroundings. It would take him fifteen minutes to find the place where Jackie Badger took food deliveries.

“Just about ready, Alex. How do I look?” Jackie stood before her gaunt, near-death colleague, still in stasis. “I hate wearing lipstick. I think it’s sexist and he shouldn’t be able to expect I’m always going to dress up like this. Every once in a while, right?”

Her insanity notwithstanding, she looked stunning: a black cocktail dress, tight around her petite figure, short hair combed straight down. Taser in her hand. “Dressed to maim.” She smiled. “Then lovingly heal.

“He and I can put the world on pause together, and then watch it like New Year’s Eve.”

She looked at the video feed from Washington, D.C.; the media was going nuts there, talking about how the Million Gun March was just a few hours away. Police had amassed in force. It looked like Tiananmen Square was about to break out. Jackie thought how proud Lyle would be after he came to his senses.

She dialed Becky’s phone number.

Forty-Eight

The Miata zoomed east on the highway, in the direction away from town and the weigh station, farther into Nevada. A ringing sound exploded. It came from the new iPhone Lyle had plucked from Becky the motel clerk. Lyle wasn’t sure the phone would even work but he suspected it might because Jackie had done something to allow it. It rang and rang. Lyle sent the call to voice mail. Better to let Jackie stew. He needed her riled up, not thinking clearly. The phone rang again. He sent it to voice mail again.

The fifth time the phone rang, Lyle put it on speaker.

“Hello, Dr. Martin,” Jackie said.

Lyle grimaced. He tried to measure her voice, figure out the best way to play her.

“This is not what Eden looks like, Jackie.”

“Not yet, Dr. Martin. Lyle. I’m so delighted you got the reference. Where are you?”

“I’m sure you know that. Jackie, this needs to stop.”

She just laughed, casually, like he was a husband being inadvertently annoying or naggy. “How does it feel?” she asked. “To be alive, truly awake.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, Lyle.” She chuckled.

“What do you want, Jackie?”

“What do you want, Lyle?” It was weirdly flirty.

“I want you to stop this, and I want you to revive Eleanor.”

Silence.

“You don’t give a shit about her.”

“Jackie, do you remember how you stood out in my lecture class.”

“Do you remember?”

“Let’s not play games, Jackie.”

“Okay, so why taunt me with this hapless pilot?”

“She’s my friend, Jackie. It’s beside the point, you’ve got to make this sto—”

“I see how you look at her and how she looks at you. Of course, she’s not looking at you at all now. She’s hanging in space like a macabre puppet.”

“Stop this, Jackie. You have to stop this.”

“I don’t want to fight!” A veritable explosion. Lyle withdrew from the phone. “Sorry, Lyle. We’re better than that. I think it’s hard right now with all the stress. But it’ll be easier when things slow down.”

“Okay, Jackie, how do we make this stop?”

“Well, first, and thank you, the seduction has to be mutual.”

“What seduction?”

“I’m not going to do all the work. Try harder. I’m trying to tell you what I need here.” She hung up.

Lyle took a right onto a dirt road. He turned off the lights. But what did it matter; she’d know he was approaching. Hell, she probably was tracking the phone. He tried to let his mind go blank. He wanted to tap into instinct. But for a moment, he could see the strange beauty that Jackie must be seeking. In the silence of a dead world, you could listen and be heard. Here she would be seen. He appreciated its seduction. And here, there was no risk of death or terrible plague because there was no life. There was no infidelity. He understood this virus called Jackie. He understood the countdown clock. She would do this to the entire world, hang it in space, free of humanity, free of menace.

The seduction has to be mutual.

Try harder.

What did she mean by that?

He let his mind go blank, trying not to overthink it.

Five minutes later, a dark shape appeared on the landscape. It was a building or huddle of them. A light hung over one of the buildings, just enough to betray the clutch. Lyle pulled into a lot beside a Tesla and he looked at the corrugated metal structure. The door was propped open, inviting him inside. He noticed a video camera—these things were everywhere—this one atop the building, scanning. Lyle pulled himself to the right to try to be as shaded as possible from the camera’s view.

He fished in his pocket for a pen and paper he’d taken from the motel and scribbled a note. Then he reached below Eleanor’s feet for the medical supplies he’d taken from the clinic. The defibrillator was still in the trunk. He left it there. He readied everything else. He picked up the pistol. He’d been to a shooting range once. He wasn’t sure he’d be any good with this thing or if he could make himself use it. Even if he did, and he shot and killed Jackie, then what? How would he stop this thing, or reverse it?

He looked at Eleanor and Jerry.

It was time.

A minute later, he walked to the door of Lantern. A light wind blew, chilling further a desert night. The last time he’d approached a mysterious setting, in Africa, he’d failed miserably. He’d failed the villagers, himself, Melanie. Yes, she’d failed him first, but he’d long before laid the foundation. As he walked, Lyle’s mind and eyes played tricks on him. He thought for a second that he saw bodies, piles of them, then they disappeared, then scattered sufferers, and then darkness again, and then a plain full of frozen humanity, people stalled in stasis by this electrical weapon that Jackie purveyed.

He walked inside and surveyed the warehouse-size room. It was largely empty. Cubicles, a bunch of litter on the floor around one particular cubicle near the middle-center. A nondescript conference table took up the room. No sign of an operation Lyle supposed he expected to see here. What was this place? He walked in tight circles, looking, gun outstretched, sidestepping discarded candy bar wrappers and empty water bottles, a soda can. He saw dirt scuffs on the floor and followed the scuffs. They went toward the back, in the direction of a stairwell. Jackie appeared at the top of it, resplendent with formal wear and evil.

“You’re not going to shoot me, are you, Lyle?” It sounded flirty. “C’mon.” She gestured with her hand for him to follow. She disappeared down the stairs.

He led with the gun. Cautious steps. Down the stairs he went until he came to a bend in the well. He started to turn the corner and he saw the device in her hand. The last thing he said to himself was “Taser.”

Everything went black.

Forty-Nine

“I made us dinner,” Jackie said. The words reached Lyle through a miasma as he was coming to.

“Have some water.” Jackie held a glass to his lips and, in spite of himself, he sipped. “There you go,” she said gently. “Relax, Lyle. It’s over.”

Jackie backed up and she sat down across from him at a square worktable. In front of each of them sat a plate with a burrito on it. Next to her plate sat a wireless keyboard. A little farther left on the table loomed two large computer monitors. One showed a live video stream, people milling about, police, a crowd of sorts. At the bottom, a caption explained the event taking place on the live stream but Lyle couldn’t focus on it sufficient to read it. On the other monitor was a clock counting backward and several boxes that looked like command lines.

“I’m just kidding about making dinner,” Jackie said. “Cheap microwave burritos. Not the kind of circumstances that lend themselves to cooking.” She looked at him and smiled. His head still hung to his chest. He lifted it as things came into focus. She had an oddly radiant look about her, triumphant and somehow nurturing. He gently lifted his arms from the armrests and moved his legs. It surprised him that he was unfettered, not chained. Then again, the door was behind her. He realized she had a Taser and the gun tucked on her side of the table.

She followed his gaze to the computer monitor.

47:21

47:20

47:19

“You’ll be out of your haze soon enough. You want more water?”

He shook his head and blinked. Could he overpower this woman?

“No, Lyle. No, you’re not going to overpower me. You don’t even want to, do you? Y’know what I actually think you’re feeling? I think you’re feeling gratitude. Certainly on some level.”

“You don’t have a limp,” he said.

“Of course not.”

He nodded. She’d faked that nicely in Steamboat.

“Maybe you don’t remember how I found you, how far I’ve brought you,” she said.

“I don’t know what you’re…”

“Shh. Listen, let me refresh your memory while you get your wits about you.”

She told him the story of finding him in his office, drunk, dark, mired in self-hatred. She’d promised him, and herself, she’d figure out how to pull him out of that place. “Now you’re alive again, inspired, hunting, discovering. Look at you.

“Don’t get me wrong. This is not all about you,” she continued. “I’d hate to start our relationship, or this stage of it, with that kind of imbalance. Leads to crazy stuff down the road.”

“There’s no down the road, Jackie,” he managed. “There’s no relationship.”

Another smile from her, caring in its own way, the look of a lover who realizes her partner doesn’t fully get yet what’s right for him.

“On the relationship count, I can tell you one hundred percent that you’re wrong. I honestly feel like no one has ever seen me as clearly as you see me.”

“Is that so?”

“Fair enough. I guess we can say that point has yet to be fully determined. But my gut tells me it’ll play out that way. It’s rare my gut ever tells me anything I can trust this much. In any case, I feel even surer that no one has ever seen you as clearly as I can see you.”

Lyle stared at this crazy person before him and considered which strategy, if any, might reorient her.

“Melanie, maybe, saw certain things about you,” Jackie continued. “Eleanor may imagine she sees things in you, but now I’m digressing and that poor torpid bitch isn’t really worth talking about. My point is that what we have is the very essence of a relationship.”

“I do see you, Jackie.”

“Thank you, Lyle.”

“I don’t think I like what I see.”

“No, that’s not what you mean.” Her voice rose. “I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat. “What you mean is that it’s hard for you to reconcile the way I’ve made you feel about yourself with some of the other things you see going on.”

He looked at the screen with the live TV feed. Now he could make out the words at the bottom: National Mall; Million Gun March. Under an Hour. Will There Be Bloodshed?

Lyle looked at the countdown clock.

38:16

38:15

“Help me reconcile it, Jackie,” he said. He needed to buy time. His plan looked very much like it was not taking shape.

“Would you like some wine, Lyle?”

“Sure.”

She poured him some red into a plastic cup.

“Let’s talk about you first. When I found you, you were all but dead. Now you are revived. Will you grant me that?”

“It’s a stretch, Jackie. I was in a bad place, and now I’m in a worse place.”

She laughed gaily.

“I think we might say the same for humanity. I want you to think in a very clear-eyed way about how the world is transforming and where it finds itself. It is on the brink of coming apart. Look at them.” She jutted her chin in the direction of the video screen. “It’s exactly—exactly—what made you so angry when things collapsed with Melanie and with that ridiculous Dean Thomas and your job.”

“I’m sorry, Jackie, I’m having trouble following.”

“I doubt that. Maybe it’s the Taser. You do realize that it was becoming very, very hard for you to defend your life choices as a doctor, to continue to get the energy to try to protect humanity. It was getting very hard to figure out what was the right thing to do. Do you remember?”

He remembered. He didn’t want to admit it to her right now because his growing skepticism from three years ago bore no relation to this monster in the black dress and red lipstick.

“Suit yourself, Lyle. You know it’s true, though. Of course, you were cynical. You’d fought on the side of people. But you eventually discovered that the viruses, the evil bacteria and disease, were so much more, well, frank. You knew where they were coming from. They declared their purpose. On the other hand, the people, humanity, what a disingenuous lot, right?”

“No, that’s not—”

“Okay, maybe a bridge too far saying that. But confusing, at least. People are confusing, at least, sending mixed messages. People put you in a difficult position, impossible positions.” She saw that he was trying to understand and she took it as encouragement. She thought of her parents, putting her in an impossible position, not knowing what to do, then her sister whom her inaction failed to save, and Denny, using her, abusing her trust. She’d had no time to figure things out, the world moving so fast. She winced and brushed away those memories. It was a new time.

“Lyle, were you supposed to treat people, help them, let them kill themselves or each other? What the hell were you supposed to do?”

Lyle felt the power of the moment. She was telling him something.

“Do people put you in a difficult position, Jackie?”

She smiled, shrugged, like Of course, aren’t we all speaking the same language here?

“Did someone in particular put you in a difficult position, Jackie?”

She gritted her teeth. He’d not move her into those terrible memories, and, besides, this wasn’t about Jackie; no, to her, this was now about everyone. Even someone as sane and wonderful as Lyle understood what it was like to be put in a terrible position, to not know what to do as violence, danger, terror loomed.

“These people, look at them”—she looked at the computer—“in Washington, at the mall, one self-righteous group of police is going to go to war with another self-righteous group of gun owners. Each certain they are saving humanity, and each about to destroy it.”

Lyle tried to latch on to the change in direction, keep her going, buy time. “We’re speaking about differences of opinions, the working out of ideas. That is politics, cooperation, compromise.”

“No! The opposite!” She slapped the table. “We’re talking about not listening. We’re talking about…”

“What, Jackie. What are we talking about?”

“We’re talking about giving people some time so that they can figure out what’s right? We’re slowing the world down. Don’t you see how important that is?”

He pulled backward at the intensity. This was what it was all about for her, and he suddenly totally grasped that basic idea. It was all moving too fast for her. She didn’t feel heard and she couldn’t hear herself.

“Let’s take our time with it, Jackie. I’m listening.”

“I know you are. You are the first person who ever really saw me. You met me in Nepal, you…” She grinned, so sincerely. “You don’t remember, do you? Oh, Lyle, of course you need to know this.” She reminded him, seeing he had a vague recollection of helping a young backpacker. “And then, years later, in the back of class, you heard me even before you actually saw me. You heard me, which is even more powerful. Then when you looked at me, you understood. Just the way you diagnosed people and what ailed them. It is such a powerful gift and I want you to know that I see you, too; I hear you. I heard you calling and I came.”

On the live video stream, there was a flash of light.

“It’s starting,” she said.

“You did that?” he asked.

“No. No. I mean that one of the nut cases on one side or another has started the violence. Honestly, I can’t tell which is the immune system anymore and which the disease—whether we’re defending or attacking ourselves. I guess maybe that’s how you felt when you got depressed. But the thing is, Lyle, the thing that I think you’ll be most proud of is that I figured out a painless way to stop things.” Before she could elaborate, the pair of them looked at the screen and the scrambling of footage as reporters and cameras jogged around. Several shots rang out loud enough to overcome the extremely low volume on the TV.

“How does it work?” Lyle asked.

“Quite effectively. Before you know it, everyone at the mall, everyone in the world, will be on pause. No more violence, no more”—she looked for the words—“crimes of passion.” She paused. “Then when they come out of it, if they come out of it, they’ll have forgotten what got them so incensed in the first place. Think of it, Lyle! A reboot for humanity.” She knew that wasn’t the question he was asking. “We’ve got a few minutes. I’ll bring you up to speed on the process.”

From the way they were talking, Lyle couldn’t tell if she felt he was softening to her, or whether she thought he remained her sworn foe. In any case, she was still keeping him in a physically inferior position. She wasn’t going to give him a chance to extricate himself or stop her, if he could even figure out how to do that. He tried to think about what he would do if she were a deadly virus. In such a case, he’d try everything to hold the disease at bay—through fluids and managing infection spread—until the body came and healed itself or he could figure out another solution, a medical miracle. His original plan looked like it was going to fail, miserably. She was going to destroy the entire planet. He could imagine her hitting the proverbial green button and everyone heading into some strange seizure and crashing their cars, falling down and splitting open their skulls, failing to turn off their ovens and having fires burn down the world.

18:16

18:15

18:14

“Is it a channelopathy?” he said. “Or more seizure?”

She perked up at the question. She loved his engagement with her, as peers, as equals.

“Physiologically, you’re probably better equipped to analyze the mechanism. But, to answer your question, somewhere between the two, seizure and channelopathy, but with much longer lasting effects. Indefinite, as far as I can tell.”

“It’s why I saw an immune response in Steamboat.”

“Right. That was so exciting to watch. Your gift emerging again. Anyhow, yes, to stay on point: the electrical signals evidently stimulate an immune response, the body recognizing something alien.”

She pointed over Lyle’s shoulder and he looked into a room that he hadn’t even realized was behind him. It was on the other side of a two-way mirror. And there sat a woman slumped in a chair. “Lyle, meet Alex. Alex has been rather unresponsive for days.”

Lyle grimaced and turned back. “Let me help her.”

Jackie just laughed again, as if to say Give me a break, Lyle.

“If you ask me, and you did, I think that all our heavy use of devices is predisposing us to this seizure state, this syndrome. It’ll be interesting to see when I flip the giant switch in the sky, whether everyone succumbs or just big groups of people. You can’t really know until you try.”

“Big switch?”

“Proverbial. I’ve already programmed it to push the algorithm through to every major transmitter in…” She looked at the countdown clock. “Fifteen minutes or so. No switch that needs flipping. I can’t believe it’s really here.”

“You said they might come out of it.”

She shook her head, not understanding his comment.

“Earlier, you said they would come out of it, if they come out of it. Will they come out of it?”

“If I reverse the frequency process. I did it in Steamboat. No harm no foul.”

“After people crashed their cars and died and who knows what else.”

“Small price to pay to save the world from itself.”

“How do we stop it, Jackie?”

She just shook her head. “I’d hate to discover you were someone who wanted to fight, not listen.”

Her eyes were wet.

“No more time. You have to decide now, Lyle. Save ’em or join ’em.”

She clicked along on the wireless keyboard and a second window opened on the monitor with the countdown clock. Lyle recognized Jackie’s intensity as the sort that might overtake him when he was in the midst of discovery. He didn’t feel seen by her, as she insisted, but he could acknowledge distant similarities. Not sufficient to have him accede to whatever she was asking him to decide in her favor. He was waiting to find out what that might be.

The clock said eight minutes and thirty seconds.

In the second window, an image appeared. It was a green field with a path cut through it leading to a mountain where aspen trees grew. It dissolved and there was an image of Melanie climbing into bed with the father of her child. It was on video feed. Lyle was watching his ex-wife climb into bed with the man she’d cheated with.

“Stop it, Jackie.”

“Fair enough, I’ll spare you the gory details.”

She closed the window. “Which world do you want to live in, sweetheart?”

He didn’t speak.

“The one where we must constantly fight to curtail the worst parts of humanity, or the one less traveled? I’m not so stupid, so naive, as to think a world on pause is a perfect world. I’m not insane, not that insane.” She laughed. She didn’t think herself nuts at all. “It’s just a world we haven’t tried yet. A world of two, for the time being at least.

“Will you join me?”

She held out her hand. It struck Lyle he might grab and yank it.

“I made this world for you, Lyle. To awaken you, and then to take away all the pain of indecision: What’s right? What’s wrong? Are people good or bad? They’re on hold, at least until we can figure out what we want to do.”

“I have a question first.”

6:56

6:55

“If I join you, if we take the road less traveled, and it doesn’t work, will you wake everyone up? Can we return to the way it was?” Lyle asked.

She shrugged. “It’s a relationship. We’ll work it out.” A nonanswer.

“How would we do that?”

“Work it out? We’d talk and we’d listen.”

“No, how would we return it to the way it was, the way it is?”

She smiled. “Are you really still trying to figure out how to reverse this?”

“I’m a doctor, Jackie. I never quit trying to figure out how to kill the disease.”

“You are a doctor, Lyle. You never stopped being one. I know that. I love that about you. So I’ll answer, in general terms. It’s a password, of course, that I’ve no need to tell you about at this point. So, what’s it going to be?”

5:27

“You know I can’t do this, Jackie.”

She looked at him, curious, shaking her head.

“It’s a chance to make something beautiful and pure.”

“You’re on your own, Jackie. I’ll go down with the ship.”

“I’m so disappointed to hear that.”

“How does that work? Do I go outside?”

“Yes, that’s one way. But I prefer something more intimate,” she said, tears in her eyes. “I’ll need you to go into that room there, behind you. It will get the signal. I will be spared it in here. You can sit, and I can watch as you fall into a stasis state. I hope the bears don’t eat you.”

“What?”

“Kidding, Lyle. If I let bears eat you, then how would I be able to enjoy looking at you now and again.”

4:47

It’s not working, he thought, the plan has fallen apart.

“Up you go,” she said.

Lyle stood. He looked at the woman on the other side of the mirror, her body inert, as Lyle’s was soon to be. He turned back to his captor.

“Jackie, would you offer me any final thoughts?”

She smiled.

“Hickam had it right.”

Now he smiled sadly, recalling his own lecture on Hickam’s dictum. It must have had an impact on her. “Patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please,” Lyle muttered.

“So true, right. It’s sheer and utter chaos, nothing so obvious and simple as Occam’s razor. What is doing us in? Everything. What can we do about it?” Then she looked at the monitor of the live feed from the National Mall, as if the image of people about to kill one another off made her point. “Hit pause. Anyhow, off you go.”

3:22

3:21

Lyle smiled grimly and let himself into the adjoining room. He stood with his arms crossed beside the chair with Alex. She did not smell good. Lyle couldn’t help but flash for a moment on his own hubris. He’d given himself too much credit. He supposed he’d prided himself in the past on the opposite. He’d tried to be humble and listen. He watched the clock count down.

When it was at two minutes, Lyle saw a hint of movement behind Jackie. It was the door to the research room. It jostled. Lyle banged on the mirror. “Jackie,” he said. “Jackie.” He waved, trying to distract her. She looked at him and walked to the window.

“It’s too late to change your mind,” she said.

“I need to talk to you, Jackie!”

“Do you mean it?” she asked, plaintive, hopeful.

1:30

Lyle put his hands on the window, as if urging her to put her hands against his. She did it.

The research room door burst open.

Jackie spun around. There stood Eleanor. She had a device in her hands, the defibrillator. She bulled forward. She crashed into Jackie. Boom! She zapped Jackie with major hits of electricity. The woman fell to the ground, seizing. Lyle exploded out of the room on the other side of the mirror.

“Lyle, are you okay? Where are we? How did you—”

“We’re almost out of time.” He ran to the keyboard.

:57

:56

Lyle had been studying the screen before and figured he had one shot to get it right, to stop this thing. On the top, he clicked on an icon that said program. Menu items materialized. He clicked on Fail-Safe.

A single word appeared.

Password.

:42

:41

“Lyle?”

Lyle froze over the keyboard. What if he got it wrong?

He started to type.

:29

:28

A few more letters. He held his finger over the enter key.

:18

:17

“Ahhhh!” It was Jackie. She’d somehow shaken off the electrical surge. She sprang forward, lurched past Eleanor, and knocked Lyle backward.

:12

:11

:10

She punched at him and kicked, spasmodic. Lyle threw her off. Sharply. She thudded to the side. Eleanor took the paddle to her again. Zap. Jackie seized, shivering with electricity.

:4

:3

Lyle scrambled to his feet. He put his hand over the keyboard.

:2

:1

Lyle hit the enter button.