The Darkness Drops Read online

  And it was more than that. As much as he infuriated her, there were ties with Yuri that she couldn’t break. Not that she would ever take him back as a husband or lover--those feelings for him had irrevocably changed. But he still loved her, always would, and some part of him was destined to remain miserable without her. She found no small amount of satisfaction in how hard he worked to remain a part of her and Kyra’s lives. From his attending birthdays and other special occasions to the three of them enjoying the occasional Sunday dinner together, he knew what he’d lost. What’s more, Kyra adored him. So their truncated version of being a family lumbered along in its fragmented way, and, however limited the bonds between them, she dreaded losing him.

  Of course some things with Yuri never changed. She suspected the son of a bitch had kept a key to the cottage door, because occasionally she’d arrive to find hairs on her brush that were completely unlike her own long black strands, and a whiff of a strange perfume would be lingering on her pillow.

  The oven timer went off, the sound making her jump.

  “Is dinner ready?” Kyra’s clear voice called from outside.

  The harsh buzz must have carried through the open sliding doors to the edge of the grasslands.

  “You bet!” Anna replied, using one of the first American expressions she’d adopted after her arrival in New York. “Come in and wash up,” she added, using another phrase that had initially puzzled her, thinking it meant to clean herself starting from the toes and working in an upward direction. Having learned English at an early age, speaking it too correctly often made her stand out as someone not native to the language. Her deliberate effort to add the imperfections and idioms of the street eventually made her less self-conscious, but sometimes her American friends found the results hilarious. Prepositions especially gave her trouble. “Get under it!” she’d once advised a colleague who’d dwelt too long on a problem. “That’s water over the bridge.”

  And of course she’d struggled with making the th sound, a nemesis for all Russians, there being no equivalent in their own language. But eventually she conquered it. It only came out as something between an s or z, a kind of sz sound, when she became very angry or frightened.

  Quick steps sounded on the wooden deck, and the little girl’s small figure emerged from the darkness. “Mommy, I found a shell!” Cheeks as red as her sweater, black hair wild from the wind, dark eyes dancing, she held the beige speckled treasure up for inspection.

  Anna stooped to admire the find. But as they chatted and set the table, her worst fear kept intruding.

  Yuri had never really left his old business of selling secrets.

  Nonsense! Szat’s water over sze bridge.

  That same day

  Emergency Department, Honolulu General Hospital, Oahu, Hawaii

  “Dr. Ryder, it’s another call from Pearl. He won’t give his name or leave a message, but insists it’s urgent.”

  Terry, in the midst of repairing a split lip, didn’t so much as look up as the woman’s voice crackled through the intercom. “Must be a spook,” he said.

  “What do I tell him?”

  “Does he sound like a spook to you?” he asked his young patient. “ A spy? A CIA secret agent?”

  Katie Sullivan grinned back at him. Just turned thirteen, she had caught her fourteen-year-old brother reading her most secret love letter from the coolest boy in class. In the ensuing fight, she gave as good as she got. Downstairs a dental resident was trying to glue a piece of that brother’s front tooth back in place.

  Katie’s smile popped the stitch he’d just tied off. “Oh, sorry,” she said, and instantly pursed her mouth, looking like a fish that had bit into a lemon.

  “It’s okay,” Terry reassured. “Only a few more to go.”

  “What do I tell him, Dr. Ryder?” the intercom voice persisted.

  “Come on, Shelly. In here, I’m all yours, remember, to have, hold, and protect, especially from those guys. Nobody at DOD can take a pee these days without classifying it as urgent.” He’d raised his voice so it would be picked up by the two-way transmitter.

  “But he sounds like the real deal.”

  “Real deal?”

  “You know, like he’s in charge and I’m not.”

  Terry’s curiosity perked up. As head nurse, Shelly Corstairs could usually intimidate any outside caller who dared to interrupt her ER routine, making most of them hang up. “Don’t tell me you’re going soft,” he said, and gave his patient a wink. “I got a lady here whose smile needs fixing. What’s more important than that?”

  A sigh of exasperation ruffled through the intercom at gale force. “This one’s so persistent, it’s scary.”

  “Then tell him to cool his heels on hold, Shelly.” He needled an edge of flesh and gently threaded the torn sides of Katie’s Cupid’s bow into perfect apposition. “As for you, Miss Katie, no laughing at your boyfriend’s jokes for ten days.”

  Five minutes later Terry walked into the nursing station, figuring his interrupter would be long gone. A call-waiting light still winked away, indicating someone was waiting on a line. This guy is persistent, he thought, and picked up the nearest receiver. “Dr. Ryder speaking.”

  “Congratulations, Ryder!” the gravelly voice said, “I’ve just won you a front seat at the show.”

  A queasy sensation in Terry’s stomach made him think that he’d stepped onto a high-speed elevator. “Suck rocks,” he replied, and slammed down the phone. “Sir,” he muttered as an afterthought.

  “My, my, aren’t we testy,” Shelly whispered as she flew by on her way to meet an incoming ambulance.

  He didn’t reply. Multiple reflections off the station’s wraparound plexiglass created cloned transparencies of himself. Tall and muscular, each with a shock of black hair, their collective gaze met his from all directions. What did you expect? they demanded in unison, the reproductions of his lean face seeming to place him under his own scrutiny. You knew that you’d be called up, and that it would be General Robert Daikens who did it.

  Expected or not, the prospect of resuming the old game sickened him. Shadow Dance, DOD called it--always trying to anticipate who might launch what invisible demons from God knows where and who knew when. He’d already volunteered for CASH duty--Combat Support Hospitals--where carnage would play by tangible rules. Horrific as the coming war might be, conventional slaughter by bullets or bombs he could diagnose and treat with proven skills and procedures.

  But with the other . . .

  Terry let the sounds and sights of the department’s orderly chaos anchor him. Monitors beeped, doctors and nurses gave orders, phones rang--the patients were packed so tightly together that they looked trapped in the webbing of IV tubes dangling from intravenous bags. Yet here he felt most at home. In the midst of failing hearts, damaged brains, overwhelming trauma, sepsis and shock--it was where he excelled, heralded by all as an artist in critical care. His edge as a physician lay in a knack to think visually. Among other things, it enabled him to read events the way master chess players could read the board and see twelve moves ahead. He anticipated what would go wrong before others even realized a risk existed. In ER it saved lives and made him a hero. In everyday life it made him appear paranoid. In the general’s world, it drove him mad.

  He glanced over at Katie who sat on a chair, legs swinging as she impatiently kept an arm still for her antitetanus booster. In a flash Terry saw her and all his other patients shrivel to emaciated husks and jackknife into paroxysms of coughing. Fast forward some more, and blood-streaked foam poured out their mouths.

  Fix a torn lip, but leave her and everyone else at the mercy of this? You’re hiding out, Ryder, his circle of ghostly inquisitors mocked from the windows.

  The shiny panes also picked up blurred reflections of the nurses, multiplying them into swirling white spirits as they rushed about the station. In the changing shapes he thought he saw Anna, the way he had sometimes imagined her in a crowd, recognizing the form of her head from
behind, or the bounce of her stride, or the tall graceful form of her body--

  Focus, he reminded himself, the bombardment by excessive visual information and memories being a downside of his prowess. What kept him functional was his ability to sift it all out, take the important bits, and leave the rest. This time he saw her face. She smiled, her expression filled with that steely resolve not to shrink from her duty, exactly as she’d accepted all her other assignments, before he and the general nearly killed her.

  “It’s him again,” Shelly said, poking her head into the station and pointing to where the blinking light summoned.

  “I’ll take it in my office.” He quickly walked out of the department and entered a dimly lit hallway painted institutional green or what the residents dubbed early-puke. Behind a row of metal doors were twelve-foot-square cubbyholes of privacy for ER staff. His own space once housed an X-ray machine and came with the added feature of being lead-lined. In addition to keeping him safe from a nuclear blast or Superman’s prying eyes, the place was soundproof. Switching the general’s call to a secure line, he picked up the receiver.

  “Don’t slam down the phone again, Terry. It hurts my feelings,” Daikens said, his voice now a soft purr.

  Silence burned on the line. It grew into a hollow rush as if Terry were holding a seashell to his ear and the expanse of an ocean grew between them.

  “Who are you kidding, Ryder, trying to duck me on this thing?” the man continued. “You know what’s got to be done, and no one does it better.”

  Terry did know.

  “I can order you,” the general went on, his tone coaxing, not bossy. “Four stars beats major, Major Ryder. Why not save me the paperwork and volunteer? Your reserve status is still active, and they’ll call you up anyway.”

  Right again. “I already volunteered, General--working the CASH at a nice downtown location in Kabul. Ever been in one? A soldier can virtually be bled out, but if he still has a pulse, we intubate, open the chest, squeeze the heart by hand, and infuse volume expanders, all under three minutes, then get him into the OR alive--”

  “Uh, uh. Noble as it is to save one life at a time, you’ll work with me, Terry. And you know why? Because I’m the attack dog in Washington with balls enough to cut corners and take on the shit that only you can see coming down the pike. What’s the alternative? Let your worst nightmares come true, knowing you could have stopped them. I don’t think so.” He spoke gently, fatherly, and oh, so persuasively. “Come on, Terry. It’s one thing to have sidelined yourself when the threat was still mostly theoretical, but now that there’s actual bogies hard-wired to fight and taking a run at us, you’re going to Shadow Dance. That imagination of yours won’t let you off the hook.”

  The general hadn’t said anything that Terry couldn’t have told himself, but there are times when you know a thing, yet can’t admit it’s true until someone throws it in your face.

  Already he was conjuring up the combinations of signs and symptoms that might result from the types of attacks that he’d be asked to prepare a defense against. Except Terry Ryder didn’t just list them mentally. He saw them.

  People asphyxiating in the pus and blood of their own lungs? Think anything from anthrax to a new strain of influenza. Add suppurating buboes? It’s pneumonic plague. See pustules? Make it smallpox. City block after city block of people lying in the streets, blood pouring from every orifice? That could be overwhelming sepsis from any number of known bacteria, perhaps even one of the hemorrhagic fevers. His mind conjured up the wormlike forms of invading Ebola virus, and before his eyes internal organs dissolved into a red sludge, succumbing to the attack. Peering along brilliantly colored spirals of DNA, he leapt to an even worse nightmare, recognizing gene sequences of familiar microbes interspersed with the helixes of vipers and black widow spiders, the combinations coded to first infect a target, then release lethal loads of deadly venom. He tried to pull up, his heart pounding. Instead he floated in a sea of new life-forms, millions of spherical, ovular, pyramidal, or cubed, translucencies, their surfaces covered with everything from spikes to tentacles to craters to tiny suckers to twisted outcroppings topped with fuzzy balls, each one as different from the other as snowflakes. These were the microbes he feared the most. Chimeric monsters designed to create death through contagion, yet ready to defy the known rules of diagnosis and treatment, they would be more overwhelming than any army.

  Terry shut down the grisly parade.

  “You’ll recruit anyone you need, Terry,” Daikens continued, “the best scientists and doctors in the country. I’ve set it up that you’ll be official this time. They’re going to call you chief advisor on Bioterror Preparedness, and stick you under a new department called Homeland Security. That’ll mean unlimited resources on demand. But unofficially, between us, it’s business as usual, and I have first dibs on whatever goodies you come up with. Remember, concentrate on leading the task force. None of those infectious-disease-Rambo stunts you sometimes pull. Go into hot zones only when absolutely necessary, and otherwise, keep your creepy, wonderfully suspicious mind safe, working full-tilt boogie for me.”

  Terry gritted his teeth. He’d kiss a cobra rather than mimic the general’s habit of sending others out to die.

  “Think beyond the anthrax attacks and explore all possibilities. I want more scenarios than a goddamned Hollywood movie. Play bad guy. Dream up your best hit. Consider even old enemies, or factions within factions of old enemies--anybody who might still want to fuck us up the ass while we fight these new sons of bitches. And I want concrete counter-measures--serums, vaccines, drugs. In other words, if a bug exists that can be weaponized, find me a remedy, an antidote, a cure. Fix especially on the high-tech stuff, all the organisms that can be adapted to sophisticated delivery symptoms, your most apocalyptic catastrophes.”

  The next attack--that all-consuming fixation hung over everyone entrusted to the business of protecting America these days. Terry’s own obsession with it had hooked his imagination as far back as a half-decade ago, fresh out of his residency at a time when the next bioterror attack would have been the first. Yet even against hypothetical adversaries, his own unique vision of the possible horrors compelled him, perhaps more than any of the other doctors recruited by the general, to serve the common cause: Stop the next big whatever, yet turn a blind eye when the tactics sickened and decency screamed No!

  “Suppose you’re right, old man,” he said, interrupting the general’s shopping list. “Suppose a truly advanced, high-tech attack is coming. And let’s also suppose that I figure the only thing scarier than a ruthless Robert Daikens’ all-out campaign against bioterror would be to not have you on that warpath. My creepy suspicious mind, as you like to call it, figures you might just use the situation to settle a few old scores. So remember, General, if I do come on board, I still know enough about your dirty tricks to make you behave. At your age, gotta think of that legacy.” Daikens’ dread that his secrets might ruin him had long created an uneasy equality between the two men, rendering their differences in rank irrelevant and providing Terry a means to keep him in check.

  “The job used to be easier against the Soviets, Terry.” The General sounded almost wistful and obviously chose to ignore his protégé’s insubordination. “There was a logic to it then--they wanted to survive as much as we did. Now we have to stop the latest suicidal fanatic who carries a two-thousand-year-old grudge and a canister of God knows what into Times Square before he or she pops the cork.”

  “Hello! Are you getting me, old man? I catch you using national security as an excuse to go after people, I’ll torpedo your legacy myself. Christ, that enemies list of yours has grown longer than Richard Nixon’s--”

  “I’m just saying, we’ve got to be preemptive. And speaking of old foes, you handle our two Russians yourself, understand?”

  “What?”

  “Anna and Yuri. Don’t be fooled by peddlers of secrets, Terry. Once they start, they often go both ways. You never can tell
when people who betray their own country will turn on another. So here’s the deal. I want you to get some of the Boca anthrax samples from the FBI and compare it to our Russian strain.”

  Terry didn’t care about Yuri, but sprang to Anna’s defense. “I said drop this shit, Robert. Nothing implicates her--”

  “Oh yeah?” he interrupted. His fatherly tones had slipped to reveal the steel beneath. “What if they didn’t deliver all their goods to us in eighty-nine, rather kept a bit back and sold it elsewhere on the side?” Then, as was his way, the general ended their conversation by hanging up, leaving Terry listening to a dial tone.

  Three days later, Monday, October 15, 2001, 6:30 A.M. EST

  Tenth Floor, Park Medical Building, upper Fifth Avenue, Manhattan

  Dr. Yuri Raskin’s place of business resembled a movie producer’s suite, not the office of an internist. He’d decorated the walls with posters of all his favorite American films, which meant practically everything he’d been able to see while still in Sverdlovsk. First were the musicals: Fred in Top Hat, Natalie in West Side Story, Marilyn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Why the culture gurus at the KGB hadn’t grasped that the simple magic of these masterpieces would subvert anyone who saw them with dreams to go over the wire and head for America, Yuri never understood. Next came his photo tribute to the gangster genre, a favorite choice of the Kremlin to show western decadence. Cagney in White Heat, Robinson in Little Caesar, Brando and De Niro in Godfather I and II--corruption and criminality personified, but for Yuri, contrary to the Kremlin’s plan, they kindled his outlaw spirit. His favorites, however, were the westerns. He’d only been able to see them after arriving in New York, on late-night television or by attending repertory cinemas. Moscow definitely had feared the seductive power of the rugged individual. John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood--these men picked up guns and drove the bad guys out of town. What if everyone in the audience got the same idea? Plus all those wide open spaces? Just the sight of such vistas would open people’s souls and invite them to throw off their chains to bask in liberty. No, cowboys weren’t welcome on the screens of Sverdlovsk. But here, in Yuri’s domain, their stories, tales of quick-draw artists who wrote their own rules--The Searchers, High Noon, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly--he celebrated them with framed copies of their original Coming Soon ads, some of them autographed. He’d “hung ‘em high,” so to speak, in his gallery.