Triggers

Chapter 43

Jan and Tony Falconi had had blackout curtains in their bedroom; Tony sometimes worked nights and needed to sleep during the day.

Eric might have had blackout curtains, too, for all Jan knew, but they’d tumbled into bed without having drawn them; no one could look into Eric’s bedroom, which was on the top floor of the condo and looked west over the Potomac. She couldn’t see the sun, which was rising on the other side of the building, but the brightening sky had awoken her.

It was Sunday morning, and neither of them had to be back at work until Monday. Oh, he was on call in case anything happened to Jerrison, but that’s why God invented the BlackBerry. She lay there, looking at him, his eyes closed, his mouth open a bit, and she listened to the soft sound of his breathing. She felt something she hadn’t felt for a long time. She felt safe.

And yet—

And yet, Washington was not a safe place these days. In the last forty-eight hours, there’d been an attempt on the life of the president, and a terrorist bomb had destroyed the White House.

Of course, she thought, nowhere was safe. There’d been the bomb in Chicago before that, and San Francisco—a city she’d always wanted to visit—and Philadelphia, where her uncle lived, not to mention terrorist attacks in London and Milan and Cairo and Nairobi and Mexico City, and the list went on and on.

Eric stirred a bit, and his eyes opened. “Hey,” he said.

Jan smiled and touched his cheek. “Hey yourself.”

“What do you want to do today?” he asked.

She looked out the window; it wasn’t snowing, and the sky looked cloudless; a nice change from yesterday. “Let’s go for a walk on the Mall.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “See the monuments, the Smithsonian.” She lifted her shoulders slightly. “I think I need to be reminded of America’s greatness.”

Eric and Jan left his apartment just before 10:00 A.M. Under her coat, Jan was wearing the spare set of clothes she’d retrieved from LT yesterday, as well as a Harvard sweatshirt that belonged to Eric, and she had on her bright red ski mittens, which had been tucked in her coat pockets. Rather than hike the six blocks to the Mall, they took a cab over; Jan was pleased to see that Eric was a generous tipper.

The cab let them off near the Arlington Bridge Equestrian Statues. Everything was beautiful: a classic winter wonderland, with pristine snow caked on tree limbs and statues. They walked to the Lincoln Memorial, approaching it from behind and keeping to the pathways, which had already been plowed—the National Park Service had its own snow-removal teams. Once there, they headed around to the front. The wooden platform and podium that had been set up for Jerrison’s speech, which they’d both seen on the news now, had been taken down. There was no obvious sign of where the president had been shot, but two young men were arguing on the steps about whether he’d been hit here or here. Jan thought that was a bit morbid, but still, she and Eric walked up the steps to look, too.

“I once went to Dealey Plaza,” Eric said.

Her face must have conveyed that he’d lost her. “In Dallas. Where Kennedy was shot.”

“Ah,” she said.

“There’s no commemorative plaque, no marker. But there is a white X painted on the roadway. If you wait for the light to turn red, you can go out into the middle of the street and stand on the spot where Oswald’s killing shot got him.”

The two people arguing about where Jerrison had been hit had come to an agreement. They took turns standing in the middle of one of the broad steps, each photographing the other. When they moved away, Jan and Eric walked to the same spot and gazed out at what, had the bullet taken a slightly altered trajectory, would have been the last sight Seth Jerrison had ever seen. Of course, it was different now: there were only a few dozen people around instead of the thousands who had been here for the speech, there was snow on the ground, and the sky was clear instead of the overcast it had been on Friday. But the Reflecting Pool stretched out in front of them, leading to the Washington Monument.

Unlike the boisterous pair who had preceded them in this spot, Eric and Jan stood in silence, but he did put his arm around her shoulders. When they’d had their fill, they walked up into the memorial and stared for a few minutes at the statue of the Great Emancipator. They then headed down the marble steps and started walking east. There were two paths they could take: along the south side of the Reflecting Pool or along the north; they opted for the north. A few other people were out strolling, and some joggers came toward them. They reached the World War II Memorial—which was Jan’s least favorite of the various war memorials; it was the most recently built, and the Vietnam and Korea ones were tough acts to follow. Then they headed up 17th Avenue to the corner of Constitution, and made their way around the gentle curve of Ellipse Road.

And there it was.

Or, more precisely, there it had been, on the other side of what was left of the metal fence.

The White House.

Jan had seen pictures on the news, but that wasn’t the same as beholding the ruins in real life. She found herself shaking her head. Her breath, visible in the chill air, gave a faint reminder of the smoke that had been billowing from the ruins two days ago.

She looked at Eric to see if he wanted to go closer; he nodded.

Secretary of Defense Peter Muilenburg studied the giant display in the windowless room. The aircraft carriers were on station, or right on schedule to reach their stations. As he watched, the red digital timer changed from “1 day 0 hours 0 minutes” to “0 days 23 hours 59 minutes.” There was no seconds display, but his pulse, which he was feeling with a finger on his left radial artery, served well enough: he was the conductor for this orchestra, and his heartbeat the metronome.

It was hard to take his eyes off the destruction in front of him, but Eric Redekop turned to look at Janis. She was just thirty-two, for God’s sake—by the time she was his age, what crazy weapons would the world be facing? How small would they be? How much damage would they be able to do? It was almost inconceivable the amount of destructive power that would be in the hands of individuals by then.

The part of him that was anchored in the here and now had been worried about where this relationship might eventually lead—about whether he’d leave her a widow in her sixties.

The part of him that half—but only half—believed all the stuff he read in science magazines and medical journals had thought that surely they’d pass the tipping point sometime in the next couple of decades and the average human life span would increase by more than a year for every year that passed, meaning that he and Jan would both have much, much longer lives than their parents or grandparents, and that, as the decades, and maybe even centuries, rolled by, an eighteen-year age difference would seem utterly trivial.

But the part of him that came to the fore now was the one that had been lurking at the back of his mind since 9/11, and had been reinforced so many times since, including when the Sears Tower went down. Now that Jerrison was safe, and Eric finally had time to take it all in, he realized it didn’t matter what miracles future medical science might hold; the planet was fucked. The world had transitioned from a place where wars were fought between nations, declared in legislative assemblies and concluded with negotiated treaties, to a place where small cabals and even individuals could wreak havoc on a massive scale. And scale was indeed the issue: the weapons kept getting smaller, and the damage they were capable of kept getting larger.

And that meant that the age difference between him and Jan didn’t matter; none of it mattered. The world wasn’t going to last long enough for him to get really old or for Jan to collect a pension. It was over; they were done—it was only a matter of time before someone wrecked everything for everyone.

He looked at her lovely, youthful face—horrified though it was right now as it studied the caved-in ruins of what had been the home of the most powerful man in the world.

“Do you know who the Great Gazoo is?” he said.

She looked at him, tilting her head slightly in a way that made him think she was sifting memories, but whether the answer came from her own childhood or from Josh Latimer’s he had no way to tell. “A cartoon character,” she said. “From The Flintstones.”

He nodded. “He was from the planet Zetox,” he said, pleased, despite the circumstances, for knowing that bit of trivia. “Do you know why he was exiled to primitive Earth?”

She tilted her head again; he rather suspected that hardly anyone besides him remembered the answer to that—but he did; it had chilled him when it had first been explained in the episode in which Gazoo was introduced, and he’d never forgotten it.

The Great Gazoo—the smug little flying green guy whose introduction for so many indicated the point at which The Flintstones had jumped the shark—had been precisely the kind of terrorist Eric now feared the world would soon face. “He’d invented the ultimate weapon,” he said to Jan. “A button that if pressed would destroy the entire universe. So his people sent him somewhere with primitive technology so he could never build anything like that again.”

She looked at him, getting it. “But it doesn’t have to turn out that way,” she said.

He gestured at the White House: the central mansion reduced to blackened ruins, the east and west wings gutted by fire. “How else can it turn out?”

She let out a sigh. “I don’t know. But that can’t be the only way.”

Others had tarried here to look at the wreckage. A small knot of Japanese tourists was standing a short distance away, listening to a guide; Eric didn’t understand anything she was saying, but she sounded sad.

At least it hadn’t been a nuclear weapon, Eric thought. But those were easy enough to ferret out with Geiger counters and other techniques; these new bombs were hard to detect.

More memories came to him—his own, from his childhood. The doomsday device going off at the end of Dr. Strangelove, and his mother always making him call her for the ending whenever it was on TV, because, despite the horrific succession of nuclear explosions, she loved hearing Vera Lynn sing “We’ll Meet Again.”

And Colonel Taylor—Charlton Heston himself—pushing down on the crystalline control panel at the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, setting off the Alpha-Omega bomb: one man destroying an entire world, so that it cracked like an egg in space.

And the end of the novel 2001, which he’d struggled to read after seeing the film for the first time when he was ten, with the Star Child detonating all the nuclear bombs in orbit around Earth, bringing a false dawn to the planet below.

And on and on and on, the collective memory of humanity, the pop culture created by people of his parents’ generation, a generation—he looked over at the Japanese tourists—who remembered Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And the horrors of his own generation, oh so terribly real: 9/11 and everything since.

And, now, in front of them, yet another echo, another aftershock, another flashback, the latest example of the ongoing, never-ending wave, the sick inversion of the old adage: the wants of the evil few outweighing the desires, the hopes, the dreams, the lives, of the many.

“It can’t go on like this,” Eric said, as much to himself as to Jan.

“It won’t,” Jan said, and he marveled for a moment at the notion of her—the young one—comforting him about the future.

They walked closer to the White House, making their way around the snow-covered Ellipse to stand by the brown metal fence at the south end. Lots of workers were scurrying about the spacious grounds, looking through rubble, collecting the countless scraps of paper, trying, Eric supposed, to make sure no fragment of a classified document could be recovered by souvenir-seekers. It was such an odd view: the ruins of the White House framed by picture-perfect trees with beautiful snow on their boughs.

Eric was startled by a rough voice. “Guess I’m not the only one.”

A man in tattered clothes, a filthy blanket around his shoulders, and a worn parka beneath that, had sidled up to stand next to Jan. He was rubbing his hands together for warmth.

She looked at him. “Pardon?”

The man indicated the White House with a movement of his head. His hair was long and might have been white if it were clean. “The only homeless one,” he said. He wasn’t making a joke, it seemed; he sounded genuinely sad.

Jan nodded, and so did Eric. On a normal day, he might have ignored the man, or briskly walked away. But this was not a normal day.

“Don’t you have any gloves?” Jan said.

“Did,” the man said. “Don’t.”

Jan pulled off her bright red ski mittens and proffered them. “Here.”

His scraggly eyebrows went up. “Seriously?”

“Sure. I can get another pair.”

Eric put his arm around her shoulder.

The man took them with his left hand andwith his right he grasped Jan’s now-naked hand and shook it. “Thank you, miss. Thank you.”

Jan didn’t flinch; she didn’t pull away from the contact. She let him hold her hand for a few seconds. “You’re welcome.”

“Well,” he said, looking again at the wreckage, “just wanted to see how the cleanup was going. Gotta get back to my usual spot.”

Eric looked at Jan just in time to see her eyebrows go up. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” she said.

“Yup. I was one of the last to go over there. Just eighteen.”

Eric was intrigued. “And you’re there every day?”

The old man nodded. “With my friends.”

“Other vets?”

“No,” he said. “My friends. On the wall. Their names. I point ’em out to people, tell ’em stories about them—those that need to hear ’em. Young folk, folk that don’t know what it was like. Can’t let people forget.”

“Darby,” said Jan. “And David. And Bob.”

The man looked just as surprised as Eric felt. “And Jimbo,” he said. “Don’t forget big Jimbo.”

Jan nodded. “And Jimbo, too.”

The old man looked like he wanted to ask her a million questions—but then his face changed, and he nodded, as if the questions had been answered. “You’re a good person, miss.”

“So are you,” she said, and then Eric’s heart skipped a beat when she added one more word, a name—his name: “Jack.”

Jack looked startled, but then an almost beatific calm came over his face. He smiled, put on his new mittens, and started shuffling away.

“You’ve never met him,” Eric said. He’d formulated it in his mind as a question but it came out as a statement.

She shook her head.

“But you know him now.”

“As well as you know me.”

Eric turned and looked back across the Ellipse, toward the Washington Monument. Jack was getting further away.

“Why do you suppose that happened?” he asked.

Jan put her hands in her coat pockets, presumably to keep them warm, but then she pulled them out again and looked them over, turning them palm up then palm down. “He touched me,” she said. And then: “I touched him.”

Eric frowned. “When Josh Latimer died, the chain was broken. I was connected to you, but you weren’t connected to anyone. And so—”

“And so my mind sought a new connection,” said Jan.

“But he wasn’t the first person to touch you since Latimer died,” Eric said.

Jan frowned, considering this, and Eric frowned, too, recalling her memories, and then they both said, simultaneously, “No, he wasn’t.”

And Jan went on: “But he was the first unlinked person. Everyone else who touched me—you, Nikki Van Hausen, and Professor Singh—was already linked to somebody.”

“What about the MRI technician?”

“He was wearing blue latex gloves. And, anyway, I’m not sure he touched me.”

“We should go after Jack,” Eric said and he started to walk south.

Jan reached out with her arm—the one with the tiger tattoo hidden beneath her clothes, although they both knew it was there—and stopped him. “No,” she said, turning to look at where the White House had been, “we shouldn’t.”