The Strain

Regis Air Maintenance Hangar

Because JFK needed the taxiway cleared, the entire aircraft was towed as is into the Regis Air long-span maintenance hangar in the hour before dawn. No one spoke as the lame 777 full of dead passengers rolled past like an enormous white casket.

Once the wheel chocks were put down and the airplane was secured, black tarpaulins were laid out to cover the stained cement floor. Borrowed hospital screens were erected to curtain off a wide containment zone between the left wing and the nose. The plane was isolated in the hangar, like a corpse inside a massive morgue.

At Eph’s request, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York dispatched several senior medicolegal investigators from Manhattan and Queens, bringing with them several cartons of rubber crash bags. The OCME, the world’s largest medical examiner’s office, was experienced in multiple-casualty disaster management, and helped devise an orderly process of cadaver retrieval.

Port Authority HAZMAT officers in full contact suits brought out the air marshal first—solemnly, officers saluting the bagged corpse as it appeared at the wing door—and then, laboriously, everyone else in the first row of coach. They then removed those emptied seats, using the added space to bag the corpses before evacuating them. Each body, one at a time, was strapped to a stretcher and lowered from the wing to the tarp-covered floor.

The process was deliberate and, at times, gruesome. At one point, about thirty bodies in, one of the Port Authority officers suddenly stumbled away from the retrieval line moaning and gripping his hood. Two fellow HAZMAT officers converged on him, and he lashed out, shoving them into the hospital screens, in effect breaching the containment border. Panic erupted, people clearing the way for this possibly poisoned or infected officer clawing at his containment suit on his way out of the cavernous hangar. Eph caught up with him out on the apron, where, in the light of the morning sun, the officer succeeded in throwing off his hood and peeling off his suit, like a constricting skin. Eph grabbed the man, who then sank down onto the tarmac, sitting there with sweaty tears in his eyes.

“This city,” sobbed the officer. “This damn city.”

Later, word went around that this Port Authority officer had worked those hellish first few weeks on the pile at Ground Zero, first as part of the rescue mission, and then the recovery effort. The specter of 9/11 still hung over many of these Port Authority officers, and the current bewildering mass-casualty situation had brought it crashing down again.

A “go team” of analysts and investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, D.C., arrived aboard an FAA Gulfstream. They were there to interview all involved with the “incident” aboard Regis Air Flight 753, to document the aircraft’s final moments of navigability, and to retrieve the flight-data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. Investigators from the New York City Department of Health, having been leapfrogged by the CDC in the crisis response, were briefed on the matter, though Eph rejected their jurisdiction claim. He knew he had to keep control of the containment response if he wanted it done right.

Boeing representatives en route from Washington State had already disclaimed the 777’s complete shutdown as “mechanically impossible.” A Regis Air vice president, roused from his bed in Scarsdale, was insisting that a team of Regis’s own mechanics be the first to board the aircraft for inspection, once the medical quarantine was lifted. (Corruption of the air-circulation system was the current prevailing cause-of-death theory.) The German ambassador to the United States and his staff were still awaiting their diplomat’s pouch, Eph leaving them cooling their heels in Lufthansa’s Senator Lounge inside terminal 1. The mayor’s press secretary made plans for an afternoon news conference, and the police commissioner arrived with the head of his counterterrorism bureau inside the rolling headquarters of the NYPD’s critical response vehicle.

By midmorning, all but eighty corpses had been unloaded. The identification process was proceeding speedily, thanks to passport scans and the detailed passenger manifest.

During a suit break, Eph and Nora conferred with Jim outside the containment zone, the bulk of the aircraft fuselage visible over the curtain screens. Airplanes were taking off and landing again outside; they could hear the thrusters gaining and decelerating overhead, and feel the stir in the atmosphere, the agitation of air.

Eph asked Jim, between gulps of bottled water, “How many bodies can the M.E. in Manhattan handle?”

Jim said, “Queens has jurisdiction here, but you’re right, the Manhattan headquarters is the best equipped. Logistically, we’re going to be spreading the victims out among those two and Brooklyn and the Bronx. So, about fifty each.”

“How are we going to transport them?”

“Refrigerated trucks. Medical examiner said that’s how they did the World Trade Center remains. Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan, they’ve been contacted.”

Eph often thought of disease control as a wartime resistance effort, he and his team fighting the good fight while the rest of the world tried to get on with their daily lives under the cloud of occupation, the viruses and bacteria that plagued them. In this scenario, Jim was the underground radio broadcaster, conversant in three languages, who could procure anything from butter to arms to safe passage out of Marseilles.

Eph said, “Nothing from Germany?”

“Not yet. They shut down the airport for two hours, a full security check. No employees sick at the airport, no sudden illnesses being reported to hospitals.”

Nora was anxious to speak. “Nothing here adds up.”

Eph nodded in agreement. “Go ahead.”

“We have a plane full of corpses. Were this caused by a gas, or some aerosol in the ventilation system—accidental or not—they would not have all gone so… I have to say, so peacefully. There would have been choking, flailing. Vomiting. Turning blue. People with different body types going down at different times. And attendant panic. Now—if instead this was an infectious event, then we have some kind of crazy-sudden, totally new emerging pathogen, something none of us have ever seen. Indicating something man-made, created in a lab. And at the same time, remember, it’s not just the passengers who died—the plane itself died too. Almost as though some thing, some incapacitating thing, hit the airplane itself, and wiped out everything inside it, including the passengers. But that’s not exactly accurate, is it? Because, and I think this is the most important question of all right now, who opened the door?” She looked back and forth between Eph and Jim. “I mean—it could have been the pressure change. Maybe the door had already been unlocked, and the aircraft’s decompression forced it open. We can come up with cute explanations for just about anything, because we’re medical scientists, that’s what we do.”

“And those window shades,” said Jim. “People always look out the windows during landing. Who closed them all?”

Eph nodded. He had been so focused on the details all morning, it was good to step back and see strange events from a distance. “This is why the four survivors are going to be key. If they witnessed anything.”

Nora said, “Or were otherwise involved.”

Jim said, “All four are in critical but stable condition in the isolation wing at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. Captain Redfern, the third pilot, male, thirty-two. A lawyer from Westchester County, female, forty-one. A computer programmer from Brooklyn, male, forty-four. And a musician, a celebrity from Manhattan and Miami Beach, male, thirty-six. His name is Dwight Moorshein.”

Eph shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

“He performs under the name Gabriel Bolivar.”

Eph said, “Oh.”

Nora said, “Ew.”

Jim said, “He was traveling incognito in first class. No fright makeup, no crazy contact lenses. So there will be even more media heat.”

Eph said, “Any connection between the survivors?”

“None we see yet. Maybe their med workup will find something. They were scattered throughout the plane, the programmer was flying coach, the lawyer in business, the singer first class. And Captain Redfern, of course, up in the flight deck.”

“Baffling,” said Eph. “But it’s something anyway. If they regain consciousness, that is. Long enough for us to get some answers out of them.”

One of the Port Authority officers came around for Eph. “Dr. Goodweather, you better get back in there,” he said. “The cargo hold. They found something.”

Through the side cargo hatch, inside the underbelly of the 777, they had already begun off-loading the rolling steel luggage cabinets, to be opened and inspected by the Port Authority HAZMAT team. Eph and Nora sidestepped the remaining train-linked containers, wheels locked into floor tracks.

At the far end of the hold lay a long, rectangular box, black, wooden, and heavy looking, like a grand cabinet laid out on its back. Unvarnished ebony, eight or so feet long by four feet wide by three high. Taller than a refrigerator. The top side was edged all around with intricate carving, labyrinthine flourishes accompanied by lettering in an ancient or perhaps made-to-look-ancient language. Many of the swirls resembled figures, flowing human figures—and perhaps, with a little imagination, faces screaming.

“No one’s opened it yet?” asked Eph.

The HAZMAT officers all shook their heads. “We haven’t touched the thing,” one said.

Eph checked the back of it. Three orange restraining straps, their steel hooks still in the floor eyelets, lay on the floor next to the cabinet. “These straps?”

“Undone when we came in,” said another.

Eph looked around the hold. “That’s impossible,” he said. “If this thing was left unrestrained during transit, it would have done major damage to the luggage containers, if not the interior walls of the cargo hold itself.” He looked it over again. “Where’s its tag? What does the cargo manifest say?”

One of the officers had a sheaf of laminated pages in his gloved hand, bound by a single ring clasp. “It’s not here.”

Eph went over to see for himself. “That can’t be.”

“The only irregular cargo listed here, other than three sets of golf clubs, is a kayak.” The guy pointed to the side wall where, bound by the same type of orange ratchet straps, a plastic-wrapped kayak lay plastered with airline luggage stickers.

“Call Berlin,” said Eph. “They must have a record. Somebody there remembers this thing. It must weigh four hundred pounds, easy.”

“We did that already. No record. They’re going to call in the baggage crew and question them one by one.”

Eph turned back to the black cabinet. He ignored the grotesque carvings, bending to examine the sides, locating three hinges along either top edge. The lid was a door, split down the middle the long way, two half doors that opened out. Eph touched the carved lid with his gloved hand, then he reached under the lid, trying to open the heavy doors. “Anybody want to give me a hand?”

One officer stepped forward, wrapping his gloved fingers underneath the lip of the lid opposite Eph. Eph counted to three, and they opened both heavy doors at once.

The doors stood open on sturdy, broad-winged hinges. The odor that wafted out of the box was corpselike, as though the cabinet had been sealed for a hundred years. It looked empty, until one of the officers switched on a flashlight and played the beam inside.

Eph reached in, his fingers sinking into a rich, black loam. The soil was as welcoming and soft as cake mix and filled up the bottom two-thirds of the box.

Nora took a step back from the open cabinet. “It looks like a coffin,” said Nora.

Eph withdrew his fingers, shaking off the excess, and turned to her, waiting for a smile that never came. “A little big for that, isn’t it?”

“Why would someone ship a box of dirt?” she asked.

“They wouldn’t,” Eph said. “There had to be something inside.”

“But how?” said Nora. “This plane is under total quarantine.”

Eph shrugged. “How do we explain anything here? All I know for sure is, we have an unlocked, unstrapped container here without a bill of lading.” He turned to the others. “We need to sample the soil. Dirt retains trace evidence well. Radiation, for example.”

One of the officers said, “You think whatever agent was used to overcome the passengers…?”

“Was shipped over in here? That’s the best theory I’ve heard all day.”

Jim’s voice called from below them, outside the plane. “Eph? Nora?”

Eph called back, “What is it, Jim?”

“I just got a call from the isolation ward at Jamaica Hospital. You’re going to want to get over there right away.”

Jamaica Hospital Medical Center

THE HOSPITAL FACILITY was just ten minutes north of JFK, along the Van Wyck Expressway. Jamaica was one of the four designated Centers for Bioterrorism Preparedness Planning in New York City. It was a full participant in the Syndromic Surveillance System, and Eph had run a Canary workshop there just a few months before. So he knew his way to the airborne infection isolation ward on the fifth floor.

The metal double doors featured a prominent blaze-orange, tripetaled biohazard symbol, indicating a real or potential threat to cellular materials or living organisms. Printed warnings read:

Eph displayed his CDC credentials at the desk, and the administrator recognized him from previous biocontainment drills. She walked him inside. “What is it?” he asked.

“I really don’t mean to be melodramatic,” she said, waving her hospital ID over the reader, opening the doors to the ward, “but you need to see it for yourself.”

The interior walkway was narrow, this being the outer ring of the isolation ward, occupied mainly by the nurses’ station. Eph followed the administrator behind blue curtains into a wide vestibule containing trays of contact supplies—gowns, goggles, gloves, booties, and respirators—and a large, rolling garbage barrel lined with a red biohazard trash bag. The respirator was an N95 half mask, efficiency rated to filter out 95 percent of particles 0.3 microns in size or larger. That meant it offered protection from most airborne viral and bacteriological pathogens, but not against chemical or gas contaminants.

After his full contact suiting at the airport, Eph felt positively exposed in a hospital mask, surgical cap, barrier goggles, gown, and shoe covers. The similarly attired administrator then pressed a plunger button, opening an interior set of doors, and Eph felt the vacuumlike pull upon entering, the result of the negative-pressure system, air flowing into the isolation area so that no particles could blow out.

Inside, a hallway ran left to right off the central supply station. The station consisted of a crash cart packed with drugs and ER supplies, a plastic-sheathed laptop and intercom system for communicating with the outside, and extra barrier supplies.

The patient area was a suite of eight small rooms. Eight total isolation rooms for a borough with a population of more than two and a quarter million. “Surge capacity” is the disaster preparedness term for a health care system’s ability to rapidly expand beyond normal operating services, to satisfy public health demands in the event of a large-scale public health emergency. The number of hospital beds in New York State was about 60,000 and falling. The population of New York City alone was 8.1 million and rising. Canary was funded in the hopes of mending this statistical shortfall, as a sort of disaster preparedness stopgap. The CDC termed that political expedience “optimistic.” Eph preferred the term “magical thinking.”

He followed the administrator into the first room. This was not a full biological isolation tank; there were no air locks or steel doors. This was routine hospital care in a segregated setting. The room was tile floored and fluorescently lit. The first thing Eph saw was the discarded Kurt pod against the side wall. A Kurt pod is a disposable, plastic-boxed stretcher, like a transparent box coffin, with a pair of round glove ports on each long side, and fitted with removable exterior oxygen tanks. A jacket, shirt, and pants were piled next to it, cut away from the patient with surgical scissors, the Regis Air winged-crown logo visible on the overturned pilot’s hat.

The hospital bed in the center of the room was tented with transparent plastic curtains, outside which stood monitoring equipment and an electronic IV drip tree laden with bags. The railed bed bore green sheets and large white pillows, and was set in the upright position.

Captain Doyle Redfern sat in the middle of the bed, his hands in his lap. He was bare-legged, clad only in a hospital johnny, and appeared alert. But for the IV pick in his hand and arm, and the drawn expression on his face—he looked as though he had dropped ten pounds since Eph had found him inside the cockpit—he looked for all the world like a patient awaiting a checkup.

He looked up hopefully as Eph approached. “Are you from the airline?” he asked.

Eph shook his head, dumbfounded. Last night, this man had gasped and tumbled to the floor inside the cockpit of Flight 753, eyes rolling back into his skull, seemingly near death.

The thin mattress creaked as the pilot shifted his weight. He winced as though from stiffness, and then asked, “What happened on the plane?”

Eph couldn’t hide his disappointment. “That’s what I came here hoping to ask you.”

Eph stood facing the rock star Gabriel Bolivar, who sat perched on the edge of the bed like a black-haired gargoyle draped in a hospital johnny. Without the fright makeup, he was surprisingly handsome, in a stringy-haired, hard-living way.

“The mother of all hangovers,” Bolivar said.

“Any other discomfort?” asked Eph.

“Plenty. Man.” He ran his hand through his long, black hair. “Never fly commercial. That’s the moral of this story.”

“Mr. Bolivar, can you tell me, what is the last thing you remember about the landing?”

“What landing? I’m serious. I was hitting the vodka tonics pretty hard most of the flight—I’m sure I slept right through it.” He looked up, squinting into the light. “How about some Demerol, huh? Maybe when the refreshment cart swings by?”

Eph saw the scars crisscrossing Bolivar’s bare arms, and remembered that one of his signature concert moves was cutting himself onstage. “We’re trying to match passengers with their possessions.”

“That’s easy. I had nothing. No luggage, just my phone. Charter plane broke down, I boarded this flight with about one minute to spare. Didn’t my manager tell you?”

“I haven’t spoken to him yet. I’m asking specifically about a large cabinet.”

Bolivar stared at him. “This some kind of mental test?”

“In the cargo area. An old box, partially filled with soil.”

“No idea what you’re talking about.”

“You weren’t transporting it back from Germany? It seems like the kind of thing someone like you might collect.”

Bolivar frowned. “It’s an act, dude. A fucking show, a spectacle. Goth greasepaint and hard-core lyrics. Google me up—my father was a Methodist preacher and the only thing I collect is pussy. Speaking of which, when the hell am I getting out of here?”

Eph said, “We have a few more tests to run. We want to give you a clean bill of health before we let you go.”

“When do I get my phone back?”

“Soon,” said Eph, making his way out.

The administrator was having trouble with three men outside the entrance to the isolation ward. Two of the men towered over Eph, and had to be Bolivar’s bodyguards. The third was smaller and carried a briefcase, and smelled distinctly of lawyer.

Eph said, “Gentlemen, this is a restricted area.”

The lawyer said, “I’m here to discharge my client Gabriel Bolivar.”

“Mr. Bolivar is undergoing tests and will be released at the earliest possible convenience.”

“And when will that be?”

Eph shrugged. “Two, maybe three days, if all goes well.”

“Mr. Bolivar has petitioned for his release into the care of his personal physician. I have not only power of attorney, but I can function as his health care proxy if he is in any way disabled.”

“No one gets in to see him but me,” said Eph. To the administrator, he said, “Let’s post a guard here immediately.”

The attorney stepped up. “Listen, Doctor. I don’t know much about quarantine law, but I’m pretty sure it takes an executive order from the president to hold someone in medical isolation. May I, in fact, see said order?”

Eph smiled. “Mr. Bolivar is now a patient of mine, as well as the survivor of a mass casualty. If you leave your number at the nurses’ desk, I will do my best to keep you abreast of his recovery—with Mr. Bolivar’s consent, of course.”

“Look, Doc.” The attorney put his hand on Eph’s shoulder in a manner Eph did not like. “I can get quicker results than a court injunction simply by mobilizing my client’s rabid fan base.” He included the administrator in this threat. “You want a mob of Goth chicks and assorted freaks protesting outside this hospital, running wild through these halls, trying to get in to see him?”

Eph looked at the attorney’s hand until the attorney removed it from his shoulder. He had two more survivors to see. “Look, I really don’t have time for this. So let me just ask you some questions straight out. Does your client have any sexually transmitted diseases I should know about? Does he have any history of narcotics use? I’m only asking because, if I have to go look up his entire medical record, well, those things have a way of getting into the wrong hands. You wouldn’t want his full medical history leaked out to the press—right?”

The attorney stared at him. “That is privileged information. Releasing it would be a felony violation.”

“And a real potential embarrassment,” said Eph, holding the attorney’s eye another second for maximum impact. “I mean, imagine if somebody put your complete medical history out there on the Internet for everyone to see.”

The attorney was speechless as Eph started away past the two bodyguards.

Joan Luss, law-firm partner, mother of two, Swarthmore grad, Bronxville resident, Junior League member, was sitting on a foam mattress in her isolation-ward hospital bed, still tied up in that ridiculous johnny, scribbling notes on the back of a mattress-pad wrapper. Scribbling and waiting and wiggling her bare toes. They wouldn’t give her back her phone; she’d had to cajole and threaten just to get a lead pencil.

She was about to buzz again when finally her nurse walked in the door. Joan turned on her get-me-results smile. “Hi, yes, there you are. I was wondering. What was the doctor’s name who was in here?”

“He’s not a doctor from the hospital.”

“I realize that. I was asking his name.”

“His name is Dr. Goodweather.”

“Goodweather.” She scribbled that down. “First name?”

“Doctor.” Her flat smile. “They all have the same first name to me—Doctor.”

Joan squinted as if she wasn’t sure she’d heard that right, and shifted a bit on the stiff sheets. “And he was dispatched here from the Centers for Disease Control?”

“I guess so, yes. He left orders for a number of tests—”

“How many others survived the crash?”

“Well, there was no crash.”

Joan smiled. Sometimes you had to pretend that English was their second language in order to make yourself understood. “What I am asking you is, how many others did not perish on Flight 753 from Berlin to New York?”

“There are three others in this wing with you. Now, Dr. Goodweather wants to take blood and…”

Joan tuned her out right there. The only reason she was still sitting in this sickroom was because she knew she could find out more by playing along. But that ploy was nearing its end. Joan Luss was a tort attorney, “tort” being a legal term meaning “a civil wrong,” recognized as grounds for a lawsuit. A plane full of passengers all die, except for four survivors—one of whom is a tort attorney.

Poor Regis Air. As far as they would be concerned, the wrong passenger had lived.

Joan said, talking right over the nurse’s instructions, “I would like a copy of my medical report to date, along with a complete list of lab tests already performed, and their results…”

“Mrs. Luss? Are you certain you feel all right?”

Joan had swooned for a moment, but it was just a remnant of whatever had overcome them at the end of that horrible flight. She smiled and shook her head fiercely, asserting herself anew. This anger she was feeling would power her through the next one thousand or so billable hours spent sorting through this catastrophe and bringing this dangerously negligent airline to trial.

She said, “Soon I will feel very well indeed.”

Regis Air Maintenance Hangar

“NO FLIES,” SAID EPH.

Nora said, “What?”

They were standing before rows of crash bags laid out before the airplane. The four refrigerated trucks had pulled inside the hangar, sides respectfully canvassed in black to obscure the fish market signage. Each body had already been identified and assigned a bar-coded toe tag by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York. This tragedy was a “closed universe” mass disaster, in their parlance, with a fixed and knowable number of casualties—the opposite of the collapse of the Twin Towers. Thanks to passport scans, passenger manifests, and the intact condition of the remains, identification of the decedents was a simple, straightforward task. Determining the cause of their deaths was to be the real challenge.

The tarp crinkled under the HAZMAT team’s boots as the blue vinyl bags were hoisted by straps at either end and loaded aboard their appointed truck with all solemnity.

Eph said, “There should be flies.” The work lights set up around the hangar showed that the air above the corpses was clear but for a lazy moth or two. “Why aren’t there any flies?”

After death, the bacteria along the digestive tract that, in life, cohabitated symbiotically with the healthy human host, begins to fend for itself. It starts feeding on the intestines, eventually eating its way through the abdominal cavity and consuming the organs. Flies can detect the putrid off-gassing from a decomposing carcass as far as one mile away.

Two hundred and six meals were set out here. The hangar should have been buzzing with pests.

Eph started across the tarp toward where a pair of HAZMAT officers was sealing another crash bag. “Hold on,” he said to them. They straightened and stepped back as Eph knelt and unzipped the seam, exposing the corpse inside.

It was the young girl who had died holding her mother’s hand. Eph had memorized her body’s location on the floor without realizing it. You always remember the children.

Her blond hair lay flat, a smiling sun pendant hanging from a black cord rested against the pit of her throat. Her white dress made her look almost bridelike.

The officers moved on to seal and take the next bag. Nora came up behind Eph, watching him. With his gloved hands, he grasped the girl gently by the sides of her head, rotating it on her neck.

Rigor mortis fully sets in about twelve hours after death, holding for twelve to twenty-four more hours—they were in that middle range now—until the fixed calcium bonds inside the muscles break down again and the body returns to flexibility.

“Still flexible,” said Eph. “No rigor.”

He grasped her shoulder and hip and rolled the girl over onto her front. He unbuttoned the back of her dress, revealing the flesh of her lower back, the small bulbous nodes of her spine. Her skin was pallid and lightly freckled.

After the heart stops, blood pools inside the circulatory system. The capillary walls, being just one cell thick, soon succumb to the pressure, bursting and spilling blood into the surrounding tissues. This blood settles in the lowest, “dependent” side of the body, and coagulates quickly. Lividity is said to become fixed after about sixteen hours.

They were beyond that time limit now.

From expiring in a seated position, and then being laid out flat, the pooled, thickened blood should have rendered the skin along her lower back a deep, dark purple.

Eph looked out over the rows of bags. “Why aren’t these bodies decomposing as they should?”

Eph eased the girl back flat again, then thumbed open her right eye with a practiced hand. Her cornea was clouded, as it should have been, and the sclera, the opaque white protective layer, was suitably dry. He examined the fingertips of her right hand—the one that had been tucked into her mother’s—and found them slightly wrinkled, due to evaporation, as they should have been.

He sat back, annoyed by the mixed signals he was receiving, then inserted his two gloved thumbs between her dry lips. The gasplike noise that escaped from her parted jaw was the simple venting of gas. The immediate interior of the mouth was unremarkable, but he wriggled one gloved finger inside to depress her tongue, checking for more dryness.

The soft palate and tongue were completely white, as though carved in ivory. Like anatomical netsuke. The tongue was rigid and oddly erect. Eph manipulated it to the side and revealed the rest of the mouth, equally drained.

Drained? What’s next? he thought. “The bodies have been drained—there’s not a drop of blood left.” If not that line, then one from a Dan Curtis 1970s TV horror show: “ Lieutenant—the corpses—they’re… drained of blood!” Cue organ music.

Fatigue was starting to set in. Eph held the firm tongue between his thumb and index finger, using a small flashlight to peer down her white throat. It looked vaguely gynecological to him. Porn netsuke?

Then the tongue moved. He jerked back, pulling out his finger. “Jesus Christ!” The girl’s face remained a placid mask of death, lips still slightly parted.

Nora, next to him, stared. “What was it?”

Eph was wiping his gloved finger on his trousers. “Simple reflex action,” he said, standing. He looked down at the girl’s face until he couldn’t look anymore, then drew the zipper up along the bag, sealing her inside.

Nora said, “What could it be? Something that slows tissue decay somehow? These people are dead…”

“In every way except decomposition.” Eph shook his head uneasily. “We can’t hold up the transport. Bottom line is, we need these bodies at the morgue. Cut them open. Figure out this thing from the inside.”

Nora, he noticed, was gazing off in the direction of the ornate cabinet, laid out on the hangar floor away from the rest of the unloaded luggage. “Nothing’s right about this,” she said.

Eph was looking the other way, at the great aircraft overhead. He wanted to get back aboard. They must have missed something. The answer had to be in there.

But before he could do this, he saw Jim Kent escorting the director of the CDC inside the hangar. Dr. Everett Barnes was sixty-one years old, and still very much the southern country doctor he had started out as. The Public Health Service that the CDC was a part of had been born of the navy, and though the PHS had long since branched off on its own, many top CDC officials still favored military-style uniforms, including Director Barnes. So you had the contradiction of a folksy, down-home, white-goateed gentleman dressing like a retired admiral in a trim khaki field uniform complete with chest candy. Looking very much like a combat-decorated Colonel Sanders.

After the preliminaries, and a cursory examination of one of the airplane dead, Director Barnes asked about the survivors.

Eph told him, “None of them has any memory of what happened. They are no help at all.”

“Symptoms?”

“Headaches, some severe. Muscle pain, ringing in the ears. Disorientation. Dry mouth. Problems with balance.”

Director Barnes said, “Generally, not much worse than anyone else getting off a transatlantic flight.”

“It’s uncanny, Everett,” said Eph. “Nora and I were the first ones on the plane. These passengers—all of them—were flat-lined. Not breathing. Four minutes without oxygen is the threshold for permanent brain damage. These people, they might have been out for more than an hour.”

“Evidently not,” said the director. “And they couldn’t tell you anything?”

“They had more questions for me than I had for them.”

“Any commonality among the four?”

“I’m pursuing that now. I was going to ask for your help in confining them until our work is done.”

“Help?”

“We need these four patients to cooperate.”

“We have their cooperation.”

“For now. I just… we can’t take any chances.”

The director smoothed down his trim white beard as he spoke. “I’m sure that, with a little tactical use of bedside manner, we can leverage their appreciation for having been spared this tragic fate, and keep them compliant.” His smile revealed an upper row of heavily enameled dentures.

“What about enforcing the Health Powers Act—”

“Ephraim, you know there is a world of difference between isolating a few passengers for voluntary preventive treatment, and confining them in quarantine. There are larger issues—media issues, to be frank—to consider.”

“Everett, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree—”

The director’s small hand came down gently on Eph’s shoulder. He exaggerated his drawl a bit, maybe in order to soften the blow. “Let me save us both some time here, Ephraim. Looking at this objectively now, this tragic incident is, thankfully—one might say, blessedly—contained. We’ve had no other deaths or illnesses on any other airplanes or in any other airports around the globe, in what is approaching eighteen hours since that plane landed. These are positives, and we must stress them. Send a message to the public at large, reinforcing their confidence in our system of air travel. I am certain, Ephraim, that engaging these fortunate survivors, appealing to their sense of honor and duty, will be enough to compel them to cooperate.” The director removed his hand, smiling at Eph like a military man humoring his pacifist son. “Besides,” continued Barnes, “this has all the hallmarks of a goddamn gas leak, doesn’t it? So many victims so suddenly incapacitated? The closed environment? And the survivors rallying after being removed from the plane?”

Nora said, “Except that the air circulation quit when the electrical did, right after landing.”

Director Barnes nodded, folding his hands in consideration of this. “Well, it’s a lot to process, no question. But, look here—this was a very good drill for your team. You’ve handled it well. And now that things appear to be settling down, let’s see you get right to the bottom of it. Just as soon as this damn press briefing is done with.”

Eph said, “Hang on. What?”

“The mayor and the governor are holding a press conference, along with airline representatives, Port Authority officials, and so on. You and I will represent the federal health response.”

“Oh—no. Sir, I don’t have the time. Jim can do that—”

“Jim can do it, but today it will be you, Ephraim. As I said, it is time for you to be the point man on this. You are the head of the Canary project, and I want someone up there who has been dealing with victims firsthand. We need to put a face on our efforts.”

That was why all this bluster about no detention or quarantine. Barnes was laying down the party line. “But I really don’t know anything yet,” said Eph. “Why so soon?”

Director Barnes smiled, showing his enamel again. “The doctor’s code is, ‘First—do no harm.’ The politician’s code is, ‘First—go on television.’ Plus, I understand that there is a time element involved. Something about wanting to get the broadcast out before this damn solar event. Sunspots affecting radio waves, or something.”

“Solar…” Eph had forgotten all about it. The rare total solar eclipse that was to occur around three thirty that very afternoon. The first such solar event in the New York City region in more than four hundred years, since the advent of America. “Christ, I forgot.”

“Our message to the people of this country will be simple. A profound loss of life has occurred here, and is being investigated fully by the CDC. It is a human catastrophe, but the incident has been contained, and is apparently unique, and there is absolutely no further cause for alarm.”

Eph hid his scowl from the director. He was being made to stand up in front of cameras and say that everything was just dandy. He walked out of the containment area and through the narrow space between the great doors of the hangar, into the doomed light of the day. He was still trying to figure a way out of this when the mobile inside his pants pocket buzzed against the top of his thigh. He pulled it out, an envelope icon slowly revolving on the LCD screen. A text message from Matt’s mobile. Eph opened it:

Eph stood staring at this electronic dispatch from his son until his eyes lost focus. He was left staring at his own shadow on the airport tarmac, which, unless he was imagining things, had already begun to vanish.