Read the book: «The Complete Strain Trilogy: The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

The Legend of Jusef Sardu

The Beginning

N323RG Cockpit Voice Recorder

The Landing

JFK International Control Tower

Now Boarding

Worth Street, Chinatown

Interlude I: Abraham Setrakian

Arrival

Regis Air Maintenance Hangar

Occultation

Approaching Totality

Awakening

Regis Air Maintenance Hangar

Interlude II: The Burning Hole

Movement

Coach

The First Night

Interlude III: Revolt, 1943

Dawn

17th Precinct Headquarters, East Fifty-first Street, Manhattan

The Old Professor

Knickerbocker Loans and Curios, East 118th Street, Spanish Harlem

The Second Night

Exposure

Canary Headquarters, Eleventh Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street

Final Interlude: The Ruins

Replication

Jamaica Hospital Medical Center

Daylight

Bushwick, Brooklyn

Lair

Worth Street, Chinatown

The Clan

Nazareth, Pennsylvania

Epilogue: Kelton Street, Woodside, Queens

Copyright

The Legend of Jusef Sardu

“Once upon a time,” said Abraham Setrakian’s grandmother, “there was a giant.”

Young Abraham’s eyes brightened, and immediately the cabbage borscht in the wooden bowl got tastier, or at least less garlicky. He was a pale boy, underweight and sickly. His grandmother, intent on fattening him, sat across from him while he ate his soup, entertaining him by spinning a yarn.

A bubbeh meiseh, a “grandmother’s story.” A fairy tale. A legend.

“He was the son of a Polish nobleman. And his name was Jusef Sardu. Master Sardu stood taller than any other man. Taller than any roof in the village. He had to bow deeply to enter any door. But his great height, it was a burden. A disease of birth, not a blessing. The young man suffered. His muscles lacked the strength to support his long, heavy bones. At times it was a struggle for him just to walk. He used a cane, a tall stick—taller than you—with a silver handle carved into the shape of a wolf’s head, which was the family crest.”

“Yes, Bubbeh?” said Abraham, between spoonfuls.

“This was his lot in life, and it taught him humility, which is a rare thing indeed for a nobleman to possess. He had so much compassion—for the poor, for the hardworking, for the sick. He was especially dear to the children of the village, and his great, deep pockets—the size of turnip sacks—bulged with trinkets and sweets. He had not much of a childhood himself, matching his father’s height at the age of eight, and surpassing him by a head at age nine. His frailty and his great size were a secret source of shame to his father. But Master Sardu truly was a gentle giant, and much beloved by his people. It was said of him that Master Sardu looked down on everyone, yet looked down on no one.”

She nodded at him, reminding him to take another spoonful. He chewed a boiled red beet, known as a “baby heart” because of its color, its shape, its capillary-like strings. “Yes, Bubbeh?”

“He was also a lover of nature, and had no interest in the brutality of the hunt—but, as a nobleman and a man of rank, at the age of fifteen his father and his uncles prevailed upon him to accompany them on a six-week expedition to Romania.”

“To here, Bubbeh?” said Abraham. “The giant, he came here?”

“To the north country, kaddishel. The dark forests. The Sardu men, they did not come to hunt wild pig or bear or elk. They came to hunt wolf, the family symbol, the arms of the house of Sardu. They were hunting a hunting animal. Sardu family lore said that eating wolf meat gave Sardu men courage and strength, and the young master’s father believed that this might cure his son’s weak muscles.”

“Yes, Bubbeh?”

“Their trek was long and arduous, as well as violently opposed by the weather, and Jusef struggled mightily. He had never before traveled anywhere outside his family’s village, and the looks he received from strangers along the journey shamed him. When they arrived in the dark forest, the woodlands felt alive around him. Packs of animals roamed the woods at night, almost like refugees displaced from their shelters, their dens, nests, and lairs. So many animals that the hunters were unable to sleep at night in their camp. Some wanted to leave, but the elder Sardu’s obsession came before all else. They could hear the wolves, crying in the night, and he wanted one badly for his son, his only son, whose gigantism was a pox upon the Sardu line. He wanted to cleanse the house of Sardu of this curse, to marry off his son, and produce many healthy heirs.

“And so it was that his father, off tracking a wolf, was the first to become separated from the others, just before nightfall on the second evening. The rest waited for him all night, and spread out to search for him after sunrise. And so it was that one of Jusef’s cousins failed to return that evening. And so on, you see.”

“Yes, Bubbeh?”

“Until the only one left was Jusef, the boy giant. That next day he set out, and in an area previously searched, discovered the body of his father, and of all his cousins and uncles, laid out at the entrance to an underground cave. Their skulls had been crushed with great force, but their bodies remained uneaten—killed by a beast of tremendous strength, yet not out of hunger or fear. For what reason, he could not guess—though he did feel himself being watched, perhaps even studied, by some being lurking within that dark cave.

“Master Sardu carried each body away from the cave and buried them deep. Of course, this exertion severely weakened him, taking most of his strength. He was spent, he was farmutshet. And yet, alone and scared and exhausted, he returned to the cave that night, to face what evil revealed itself after dark, to avenge his forebears or die trying. This is known from a diary he kept, discovered in the woods many years later. This was his last entry.”

Abraham’s mouth hung empty and open. “But what happened, Bubbeh?”

“No one truly knows. Back at home, when six weeks stretched to eight, and ten, with no word, the entire hunting party was feared lost. A search party was formed and found nothing. Then, in the eleventh week, one night a carriage with curtained windows arrived at the Sardu estate. It was the young master. He secluded himself inside the castle, inside a wing of empty bedrooms, and was rarely, if ever, seen again. At that time, only rumors followed him back, about what had happened in the Romanian forest. A few who did claim to see Sardu—if indeed any of these accounts could be believed—insisted that he had been cured of his infirmities. Some even whispered that he had returned possessed of great strength, matching his superhuman size. Yet so deep was Sardu’s mourning for his father and his uncles and cousins, that he was never again seen about during work hours, and discharged most of his servants. There was movement about the castle at night—hearth fires could be seen glowing in windows—but over time, the Sardu estate fell into disrepair.

“But at night … some claimed to hear the giant walking about the village. Children, especially, passed the tale of hearing the pick-pick-pick of his walking stick, which Sardu no longer relied upon but used to call them out of their night beds for trinkets and treats. Disbelievers were directed to holes in the soil, some outside bedroom windows, little poke marks as from his wolf-handled stick.”

His bubbeh’s eyes darkened. She glanced at his bowl, seeing that most of the soup was gone.

“Then, Abraham, some peasant children began to disappear. Stories went around of children vanishing from surrounding villages as well. Even from my own village. Yes, Abraham, as a girl your bubbeh grew up just a half-day’s walk from Sardu’s castle. I remember two sisters. Their bodies were found in a clearing of the woods, as white as the snow surrounding them, their open eyes glazed with frost. I myself, one night, heard not too distantly the pick-pick-pick—such a powerful, rhythmic noise—and pulled my blanket fast over my head to block it out, and didn’t sleep again for many days.”

Abraham gulped down the end of the story with the remains of his soup.

“Much of Sardu’s village was eventually abandoned and became an accursed place. The Gypsies, when their carriage train passed through our town, told of strange happenings, of hauntings and apparitions near the castle. Of a giant who prowled the moonlit land like a god of the night. It was they who warned us, ‘Eat and grow strong—or else Sardu will get you.’ Why it is important, Abraham. Ess gezunterhait! Eat and be strong. Scrape that bowl now. Or else—he will come.” She had come back from those few moments of darkness, of remembering. Her eyes came back to their lively selves. “Sardu will come. Pick-pick-pick.”

And finish he did, every last remaining beet string. The bowl was empty and the story was over, but his belly and his mind were full. His eating pleased his bubbeh, and her face was, for him, as clear an expression of love that existed. In these private moments at the rickety family table, they communed, the two of them, sharing food of the heart and the soul.

A decade later, the Setrakian family would be driven from their woodwork shop and their village, though not by Sardu. A German officer was billeted in their home, and the man, softened by his hosts’ utter humanity, having broken bread with them over that same wobbly table, one evening warned them not to follow the next day’s order to assemble at the train station, but to leave their home and their village that very night.

Which they did, the entire extended family together—all eight of them—journeying into the countryside with as much as they could carry. Bubbeh slowed them down. Worse—she knew that she was slowing them down, knew that her presence placed the entire family at risk, and cursed herself and her old, tired legs. The rest of the family eventually went on ahead, all except for Abraham—now a strong young man and full of promise, a master carver at such a young age, a scholar of the Talmud, with a special interest in the Zohar, the secrets of Jewish mysticism—who stayed behind, at her side. When word reached them that the others had been arrested at the next town, and had to board a train for Poland, his bubbeh, wracked with guilt, insisted that, for Abraham’s sake, she be allowed to turn herself in.

“Run, Abraham. Run from the Nazi. As from Sardu. Escape.”

But he would not have it. He would not be separated from her.

In the morning he found her on the floor of the room they had shared—in the house of a sympathetic farmer—having fallen off in the night, her lips charcoal black and peeling and her throat black through her neck, dead from the animal poison she had ingested. With his host family’s gracious permission, Abraham Setrakian buried her beneath a flowering silver birch. Patiently, he carved her a beautiful wooden marker, full of flowers and birds and all the things that had made her happiest. And he cried and cried for her—and then run he did.

He ran hard from the Nazis, hearing a pick-pick-pick all the time at his back …

And evil followed closely behind.

THE BEGINNING

N323RG Cockpit Voice Recorder

Excerpts, NTSB transcription, Flight 753, Berlin (TXL) to New York (JFK), 9/24/10:

2049:31 [Public-address microphone is switched ON.]

CAPT. PETER J. MOLDES: “Ah, folks, this is Captain Moldes up in the flight deck. We should be touching down on the ground in a few minutes for an on-time arrival. Just wanted to take a moment and let you know we certainly ’preciate you choosing Regis Airlines, and that, on behalf of First Officer Nash and myself and your cabin crew, hope you come back and travel with us again real soon …”

2049:44 [Public-address microphone is switched OFF.]

CAPT. PETER J. MOLDES: “… so we can all keep our jobs.” [cockpit laughter]

2050:01 Air-traffic control New York (JFK): “Regis 7-5-3 heavy, approaching left, heading 1-0-0. Clear to land on 13R.”

CAPT. PETER J. MOLDES: “Regis 7-5-3 heavy, approaching left, 1-0-0, landing on runway 13R, we have it.”

2050:15 [Public-address microphone is switched ON.]

CAPT. PETER J. MOLDES: “Flight attendants, prepare for landing.”

2050:18 [Public-address microphone is switched OFF.]

FIRST OFFICER RONALD W. NASH IV: “Landing gear clear.”

CAPT. PETER J. MOLDES: “Always nice coming home …”

2050:41 [Banging noise. Static. High-pitched noise.]

END OF TRANSMISSION

THE LANDING

JFK International Control Tower

The dish, they called it. Glowing green monochrome (JFK had been waiting for new color screens for more than two years now), like a bowl of pea soup supplemented with clusters of alphabet letters tagged to coded blips. Each blip represented hundreds of human lives, or, in the old nautical parlance that endured in air travel to this day, souls.

Hundreds of souls.

Perhaps that was why all the other air-traffic controllers called Jimmy Mendes “Jimmy the Bishop.” The Bishop was the only ATC who spent his entire eight-hour shift standing rather than sitting, wielding a number 2 pencil in his hand and pacing back and forth, talking commercial jets into New York from the busy tower cab 321 feet above John F. Kennedy International Airport like a shepherd tending his flock. He used the pink pencil eraser to visualize the aircraft under his command, their positions relative to one another, rather than relying exclusively upon his two-dimensional radar screen.

Where hundreds of souls beeped every second.

“United 6-4-2, turn right heading 1-0-0, climb to five thousand.”

But you couldn’t think like that when you were on the dish. You couldn’t dwell on all those souls whose fates rested under your command: human beings packed inside winged missiles rocketing miles above the earth. You couldn’t big-picture it: all the planes on your dish, and then all the other controllers muttering coded headset conversations around you, and then all of the planes on their dishes, and then the ATC tower over at neighboring LaGuardia … and then all the ATC towers of every airport in every city in the United States … and then all across the world …

Calvin Buss, the air-traffic-control area manager and Jimmy the Bishop’s immediate supervisor, appeared at his shoulder. He was back early from a break, in fact, still chewing his food. “Where are you with Regis 7-5-3?”

“Regis 7-5-3 is home.” Jimmy the Bishop took a quick, hot look at his dish to confirm. “Proceeding to gate.” He scrolled back his gate-assignment roster, looking for 7-5-3. “Why?”

“Ground radar says we have an aircraft stalled on Foxtrot.”

“The taxiway?” Jimmy checked his dish again, making sure all his bugs were good, then reopened his channel to DL753. “Regis 7-5-3, this is JFK tower, over.”

Nothing. He tried again.

“Regis 7-5-3, this is JFK tower, come in, over.”

He waited. Nothing, not even a radio click.

“Regis 7-5-3, this is JFK tower, are you reading me, over.”

A traffic assistant materialized behind Calvin Buss’s shoulder. “Comm problem?” he suggested.

Calvin Buss said, “Gross mechanical failure, more likely. Somebody said the plane’s gone dark.”

“Dark?” said Jimmy the Bishop, marveling at what a near miss that would be, the aircraft’s gross mechanicals shitting the bed just minutes after landing. He made a mental note to stop off on the way home and play 753 for tomorrow’s numbers.

Calvin plugged his own earphone into Jimmy’s b-comm audio jack. “Regis 7-5-3, this is JFK tower, please respond. Regis 7-5-3, this is the tower, over.”

Waiting, listening.

Nothing.

Jimmy the Bishop eyed his pending blips on the dish—no conflict alerts, all his aircraft okay. “Better advise on a reroute around Foxtrot,” he said.

Calvin unplugged and stepped back. He got a middle-distance look in his eyes, staring past Jimmy’s console to the windows of the tower cab, out in the general direction of the taxiway. His look showed as much confusion as concern. “We need to get Foxtrot cleared.” He turned to the traffic assistant. “Dispatch somebody for a visual.”

Jimmy the Bishop clutched his belly, wishing he could reach inside and somehow massage the sickness roiling at its pit. His profession, essentially, was midwifery. He assisted pilots in delivering planes full of souls safely out of the womb of the void and unto the earth. What he felt now were pangs of fear, like those of a young doctor having delivered his very first stillborn.

Terminal 3 Tarmac

LORENZA RUIZ was on her way out to the gate, driving a baggage conveyor, basically a hydraulic ramp on wheels. When 753 didn’t show around the corner as expected, Lo rolled out farther for a little peek, as she was due her break soon. She wore protective headphones, a Mets hoodie underneath her reflective vest, goggles—that runway grit was a bitch—with her orange marshaling batons lying next to her hip, on the seat.

What in the hell?

She pulled off her goggles as though needing to see it with her bare eyes. There it was, a Regis 777, a big boy, one of the new ones on the fleet, sitting out on Foxtrot in darkness. Total darkness, even the nav lights on the wings. All she saw was the smooth, tubular surface of the fuselage and wings glowing faintly under the landing lights of approaching planes. One of them, Lufthansa 1567, missing a collision with its landing gear by a mere foot.

“Jesus Santisimo!”

She called it in.

“We’re already on our way,” said her supervisor. “Crow’s nest wants you to roll out and take a look.”

“Me?” Lo said.

She frowned. That’s what you get for curiosity. So she went, following the service lane out from the passenger terminal, crossing the taxiway lines painted onto the apron. She was a little nervous, and very watchful, having never driven out this far before. The FAA had strict rules about how far out the conveyors and baggage trailers were supposed to go.

She turned past the blue guide lamps edging the taxiway. The plane appeared to have been shut down completely, stem to stern. No beacon light, no anticollision light, no lights in the cabin windows. Usually, even from the ground, thirty feet below, through the tiny windshield like eyes slanting over the characteristic Boeing nose, you could see up and inside the cockpit, the overhead switch panel and the instrument lights glowing darkroom red. But there were no lights at all.

Lo idled ten yards back from the tip of the long left wing. You work the tarmac long enough—Lo had eight years in now, longer than both of her marriages put together—you pick up a few things. The trailing edge flaps and the ailerons—the spoiler panels on the back sides of the wings—were all straight up like Paula Abdul, which is how pilots set them after runway touchdown. The turbojets were quiet and still, and they usually took a while to stop chewing air even after switch off, sucking in grit and bugs like great ravenous vacuums. So this big baby had come in clean and set down all nice and easy and gotten this far before—lights out.

Even more alarmingly, if it had been cleared for landing, whatever had gone wrong happened in the space of two, maybe three minutes. What can go wrong that fast?

Lo pulled a little bit closer, rolling in behind the wing. If those turbofans were to start up all of a sudden, she didn’t want to get sucked in and shredded like some Canadian goose. She drove near the freight hold, the area of the plane she was best acquainted with, down toward the tail, stopping beneath the rear exit door. She set the locking brake and worked the stick that raised her ramp, which at its height topped out at about a thirty-degree incline. Not enough, but still. She got out, reached back in for her batons, and walked up the ramp toward the dead airplane.

Dead? Why did she think that? The thing had never been alive—

But for a moment, Lorenza thought of the image of a large, rotting corpse, a beached whale. That was what the plane looked like to her: a festering carcass; a dying leviathan.

The wind stopped as she neared the top, and you have to understand one thing about the climate out on the apron at JFK: the wind never stops. As in never ever. It is always windy out on the tarmac, with the planes coming in and the salt marsh and the friggin’ Atlantic Ocean just on the other side of Rockaway. But all of a sudden it got real silent—so silent that Lo pulled down her big-muff headphones, just to be certain. She thought she heard pounding coming from inside the plane, but realized it was just the beating of her own heart. She turned on her flashlight and trained it on the right flank of the plane.

Following the circular splash of her beam, she could see that the fuselage was still slick and pearly from its descent, smelling like spring rain. She shined her light on the long row of windows. Every interior shade was pulled down.

That was strange. She was spooked now. Majorly spooked. Dwarfed by a massive, $250-million, 383-ton flying machine, she had a fleeting yet palpable and cold sensation of standing in the presence of a dragonlike beast. A sleeping demon only pretending to be asleep, yet capable, at any moment, of opening its eyes and its terrible mouth. An electrically psychic moment, a chill running through her with the force of a reverse orgasm, everything tightening, knotting up.

Then she noticed that one of the shades was up now. The fine hairs went so prickly on the back of her neck, she put her hand there to console them, like soothing a jumpy pet. She had missed seeing that shade before. It had always been up—always.

Maybe …

Inside the plane, the darkness stirred. And Lo felt as if something were observing her from within it.

She whimpered, just like a child, but couldn’t help it. She was paralyzed. A throbbing rush of blood, rising as though commanded, tightened her throat …

And she understood it then, unequivocally: something in there was going to eat her …

The gusting wind started up again, as though it had never paused, and Lo didn’t need any more prompting. She backed down the ramp and jumped inside her conveyor, putting it in reverse with the alert beeping and her ramp still up. The crunching noise was one of the blue taxiway lights beneath her treads as she sped away, half on and half off the grass, toward the approaching lights of half a dozen emergency vehicles.

JFK International Control Tower

CALVIN BUSS had switched to a different headset, and was giving orders as set forth in the FAA national playbook for taxiway incursions. All arrivals and departures were halted in a five-mile airspace around JFK. This meant that volume was stacking up fast. Calvin canceled breaks and ordered every on-shift controller to try to raise Flight 753 on every available frequency. It was as close to chaos in the JFK tower as Jimmy the Bishop had ever seen.

Port Authority officials—guys in suits muttering into Nextels—gathered at his back. Never a good sign. Funny how people naturally assemble when faced with the unexplained.

Jimmy the Bishop tried his call again, to no avail.

One suit asked him, “Hijack signal?”

“No,” said Jimmy the Bishop. “Nothing.”

“No fire alarm?”

“Of course not.”

“No cockpit door alarm?” said another.

Jimmy the Bishop saw that they had entered the “stupid questions” phase of the investigation. He summoned the patience and good judgment that made him a successful air-traffic controller. “She came in smooth and set down soft. Regis 7-5-3 confirmed the gate assignment and turned off the runway. I terminated radar and transitioned it over to ASDE.”

Calvin said, one hand over his earphone mic, “Maybe the pilot had to shut down?”

“Maybe,” said Jimmy the Bishop. “Or maybe it shut down on him.”

A suit said, “Then why haven’t they opened a door?”

Jimmy the Bishop’s mind was already spinning on that. Passengers, as a rule, won’t sit still for a minute longer than they had to. The previous week, a jetBlue arriving from Florida had very nearly undergone a mutiny, and that was over stale bagels. Here, these people had been sitting tight for, what—maybe fifteen minutes. Completely in the dark.

Jimmy the Bishop said, “It’s got to be starting to get hot in there. If the electrical is shut down, there’s no air circulating inside. No ventilation.”

“So what the hell are they waiting for?” said another suit.

Jimmy the Bishop felt everyone’s anxiety going up. That hole in your gut when you realize that something is about to happen, something really, really wrong.

“What if they can’t move?” he muttered before he could stop himself from speaking.

“A hostage situation? Is that what you mean?” asked the suit.

The Bishop nodded quietly … but he wasn’t thinking that. For whatever reason, all he could think was … souls.

Taxiway Foxtrot

THE PORT AUTHORITY’S aircraft rescue firefighters went out on a standard airliner distress deployment, six vehicles including the fuel spill foamer, pumper, and aerial ladder truck. They pulled up at the stuck baggage conveyor before the blue lamps edging Foxtrot. Captain Sean Navarro hopped off the back step of the ladder truck, standing there in his helmet and fire suit before the dead plane. The rescue vehicles’ lights flashing against the fuselage imbued the aircraft with a fake red pulse. It looked like an empty plane set out for a nighttime training drill.

Captain Navarro went up to the front of the truck and climbed in with the driver, Benny Chufer. “Call in to maintenance and get those staging lights out here. Then pull up behind the wing.”

Benny said, “Our orders are to hang back.”

Captain Navarro said, “That’s a plane full of people there. We’re not paid to be glorified road flares. We’re paid to save lives.”

Benny shrugged and did as the cap told him. Captain Navarro climbed back out of the rig and up onto the roof, and Benny raised the boom just enough to get him up on the wing. Captain Navarro switched on his flashlight and stepped over the trailing edge between the two raised flaps, his boot landing right where it said, in bold black lettering, DON’T STEP HERE.

He walked along the broadening wing, twenty feet above the tarmac. He went to the over-wing exit, the only door on the aircraft installed with an exterior emergency release. There was a small, unshaded window set in the door, and he tried to peer through, past the beads of condensation inside the double-thick glass, seeing nothing inside except more darkness. It had to be as stifling as an iron lung in there.

Why weren’t they calling out for help? Why wasn’t he hearing any movement inside? If still pressurized, then the plane was airtight. Those passengers were running out of oxygen.

With his fire gloves on, he pushed in the twin red flaps and pulled the door handle out from its recess. He rotated it in the direction of the arrows, nearly 180 degrees, and tugged. The door should have popped outward then, but it would not open. He pulled again, but knew immediately that his effort was useless—no give whatsoever. There was no way it could have been stuck from the inside. The handle must have jammed. Or else something was holding it from the inside.

He went back down wing to the ladder top. He saw an orange utility light spinning, an airport cart on its way out from the international terminal. Closer, he saw it was driven by blue-jacketed agents of the Transportation Security Administration.

“Here we go,” muttered Captain Navarro, starting down the ladder.

There were five of them, each one introducing himself in turn, but Captain Navarro didn’t waste any effort trying to remember names. He had come to the plane with fire engines and foaming equipment; they came with laptops and mobile handhelds. For a while he just stood and listened while they talked into their devices and over each other:

“We need to think long and hard before we push the Homeland Security button here. Nobody wants a shit storm for nothing.”

“We don’t even know what we have. You ring that bell and scramble fighters up here from Otis Air Force Base, you’re talking about panicking the entire eastern seaboard.”

“If it is a bomb, they waited until the last possible moment.”

“Explode it on U.S. soil, maybe.”

“Maybe they’re playing dead for a while. Staying radio dark. Luring us closer. Waiting for the media.”

One guy was reading from his phone. “I have the flight originating from Tegel, in Berlin.”

Another spoke into his. “I want someone on the ground in Germany who sprechen ze English. We need to know if they’ve seen any suspicious activity there, any breaches. Also, we need a primer on their baggage-handling procedures.”

Another ordered: “Check the flight plan and reclear the passenger manifest. Yes—every name, run them again. This time accounting for spelling variations.”

“Okay,” said another, reading from his handheld. “Full specs. Plane reg is N323RG. Boeing 777–200LR. Most recent transit check was four days ago, at Atlanta Hartsfield. Replaced a worn duct slider on the left engine’s thrust reverser, and a worn mount bushing on the right. Deferred repair of a dent in the left-aft inboard flap assembly due to flight schedule. Bottom line—she got a clean bill of health.”

“Triple sevens are new orders, aren’t they? A year or two out?”

“Three hundred and one max capacity. This flight boarded two ten. A hundred and ninety-nine passengers, two pilots, nine cabin crew.”

“Any unticketed?” That meant infants.

“I’m showing no.”

“Classic tactic,” said the one focused on terror. “Create a disturbance, draw first responders, gain an audience—then detonate for max impact.”

“If so, then we’re already dead.”

They looked at each other uncomfortably.

“We need to pull these rescue vehicles back. Who was that fool up there stomping on the wing?”

Captain Navarro edged forward, surprising them with a response. “That was me.”

“Ah. Well.” The guy coughed once into his fist. “That’s maintenance personnel only up there, Captain. FAA regs.”

“I know it.”

“Well? What’d you see? Anything?”

Navarro said, “Nothing. Saw nothing, heard nothing. All the window shades are drawn down.”

“Drawn down, you say? All of them?”

“All of them.”

“Did you try the over-wing exit?”

“I did indeed.”

“And?”

“It was stuck.”

“Stuck? That’s impossible.”

“It’s stuck,” said Captain Navarro, showing more patience with these five than he did with his own kids.

The senior man stepped away to make a call. Captain Navarro looked at the others. “So what are we going to do here, then?”

“That’s what we’re waiting to find out.”

“Waiting to find out? You have how many passengers on this plane? How many 911 calls have they made?”

One man shook his head. “No mobile 911 calls from the plane yet.”

“Yet?” said Captain Navarro.

The guy next to him said, “Zero for one-ninety-nine. Not good.”

“Not good at all.”

Captain Navarro looked at them in amazement. “We have to do something, and now. I don’t need permission to grab a fire ax and start smashing in windows when people are dead or dying in there. There is no air inside that plane.”

The senior man came back from his phone call. “They’re bringing out the torch now. We’re cutting her open.”

Dark Harbor, Virginia

CHESAPEAKE BAY, black and churning at that late hour.

Inside the glassed-in patio of the main house, on a scenic bluff overlooking the bay, a man reclined in a specially made medical chair. The lights were dimmed for his comfort as well as for modesty. The industrial thermostats, of which there were three for this room alone, maintained a temperature of sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Stravinsky played quietly, The Rite of Spring, piped in through discreet speakers to obscure the relentless shushing pump of the dialysis machine.

A faint plume of breath emerged from his mouth. An onlooker might have believed the man near death. Might have thought they were witnessing the last days or weeks of what was, judging by the sprawling seventeen-acre estate, a dramatically successful life. Might even have remarked on the irony of a man of such obvious wealth and position meeting the same end as a pauper.

Only, Eldritch Palmer was not at the end. He was in his seventy-sixth year, and he had no intention of giving up on anything. Nothing at all.

The esteemed investor, businessman, theologian, and high-powered confidant had been undergoing the same procedure for three to four hours every evening for the past seven years of his life. His health was frail and yet manageable, overseen by round-the-clock physicians and aided by hospital-grade medical equipment purchased for his private, in-home use.

Wealthy people can afford excellent health care, and they can also afford to be eccentric. Eldritch Palmer kept his peculiarities hidden from public view, even from his inner circle. The man had never married. He had never sired an heir. And so a major topic of speculation about Palmer was what plans he might have for his vast fortune after his death. He had no second-in-command at his primary investment entity, the Stoneheart Group. He had no public affiliation with any foundations or charities, unlike the two men jockeying for number one with him on the annual Forbes list of the world’s richest Americans, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway investor Warren Buffett. (If certain gold reserves in South America and other holdings by shadow corporations in Africa were factored into Forbes’s accounting, Palmer alone would hold the top spot on the list.) Palmer had never even drafted a will, an estate-planning lapse unthinkable for a man with even one one-thousandth of his wealth and treasure.

But Eldritch Palmer was, quite simply, not planning to die.

Hemodialysis is a procedure in which blood is removed from the body through a system of tubing, ultrafiltered through a dialyzer, or artificial kidney, and then returned to the body cleansed of waste products and impurities. Ingoing and outgoing needles are inserted into a synthetic arteriovenous graft semipermanently installed in the forearm. The machine for this procedure was a state-of-the-art Fresenius model, continuously monitoring Palmer’s critical parameters and alerting Mr. Fitzwilliam, never more than two rooms away, of any readings outside the normal range.

Loyal investors were accustomed to Palmer’s perpetually gaunt appearance. It had essentially become his trademark, an ironic symbol of his monetary strength, that such a delicate, ashen-looking man should wield such power and influence in both international finance and politics. His legion of faithful investors numbered thirty thousand strong, a financially elite bloc of people: the buy-in was two million dollars, and many who had invested with Palmer for decades were worth mid-nine figures. The buying power of his Stoneheart Group gave him enormous economic leverage, which he put to effective and occasionally ruthless use.

The west doors opened from the wide hallway, and Mr. Fitzwilliam, who doubled as the head of Palmer’s personal security detail, entered with a portable, secure telephone on a sterling-silver serving tray. Mr. Fitzwilliam was a former U.S. Marine with forty-two confirmed combat kills and a quick mind, whose postmilitary medical schooling Palmer had financed. “The undersecretary for Homeland Security, sir,” he said, with a plume of breath steaming in the cold room.

Normally Palmer allowed no intrusions during his nightly replenishment, preferring instead to use the time contemplatively. But this was a call he had been expecting. He accepted the telephone from Mr. Fitzwilliam, and waited for him to dutifully withdraw.

Palmer answered, and was informed about the dormant airplane. He learned that there was considerable uncertainty as to how to proceed by officials at JFK. The caller spoke anxiously, with self-conscious formality, like a proud child reporting a good deed. “This is a highly unusual event, and I thought you’d want to be apprised immediately, sir.”

“Yes,” Palmer told the man. “I do appreciate such courtesy.”

“Ha-have a good night, sir.”

Palmer hung up and set the phone down in his small lap. A good night indeed. He felt a pang of anticipation. He had been expecting this. And now that the plane had landed, he knew it had begun—and in what spectacular fashion.

Excitedly, he turned to the large-screen television on the side wall and used the remote control on the arm of his chair to activate the sound. Nothing about the airplane yet. But soon …

He pressed the button on an intercom. Mr. Fitzwilliam’s voice said, “Yes, sir?”

“Have them ready the helicopter, Mr. Fitzwilliam. I have some business to attend to in Manhattan.”

Eldritch Palmer rang off, then looked through the wall of windows out over the great Chesapeake Bay, roiling and black, just south of where the steely Potomac emptied into her dark depths.

Taxiway Foxtrot

THE MAINTENANCE CREW wheeled oxygen tanks underneath the fuselage. Cutting in was an emergency procedure of last resort. All commercial aircraft were constructed with specified “chop-out” areas. The triple seven’s chop out was in the rear fuselage, beneath the tail, between the aft cargo doors on the right side. The LR in Boeing 777–200LR stood for long range, and as a C-market model with a top range exceeding 9,000 nautical miles (nearly 11,000 U.S.) and a fuel capacity of up to 200,000 liters (more than 50,000 gallons), the aircraft had, in addition to the traditional fuel tanks inside the wing bodies, three auxiliary tanks in the rear cargo hold—thus the need for a safe chop-out area.

The maintenance crew was using an Arcair slice pack, an exothermic torch favored for disaster work not only because it was highly portable, but because it was also oxygen powered, using no hazardous secondary gases such as acetylene. The work of cutting through the thick fuselage shell would take about one hour.

No one on the tarmac at this point was anticipating a happy outcome. There had been no 911 calls from passengers inside the aircraft. No light, noise, or signal of any kind emanating from inside Regis 753. The situation was mystifying.

A Port Authority emergency services unit mobile-command vehicle was cleared through to the terminal apron, set up behind powerful construction lights trained on the jet. Their SWAT team was trained for evacuations, hostage rescue, and antiterrorism assaults on the bridges, tunnels, bus terminals, airports, PATH rail lines, and seaports of New York and New Jersey. Tactical officers were outfitted with light body armor and Heckler-Koch submachine guns. A pair of German shepherds were out sniffing around the main landing gear—two sets of six enormous tires—trotting around with their noses in the air as if they could smell the trouble here too.

Captain Navarro wondered for a moment if anyone was actually still on board. Hadn’t there been a Twilight Zone where a plane landed empty?

The maintenance crew sparked up the torches and was just starting in on the underside of the hull when one of the canines started howling. The dog was baying, actually, and spinning around and around on his leash in tight circles.

Captain Navarro saw his ladder man, Benny Chufer, pointing up at the midsection of the aircraft. A thin, black shadow appeared before his eyes. A vertical slash of darkest black, disrupting the perfectly smooth breast of the fuselage.

The exit door over the wing. The one Captain Navarro hadn’t been able to budge.

It was open now.

It made no sense to him, but Navarro kept quiet, struck dumb by the sight. Maybe a latch failure, a malfunction in the handle … maybe he had not tried hard enough … or maybe—just maybe—someone had finally opened the door.

JFK International Control Tower

THE PORT AUTHORITY had pulled Jimmy the Bishop’s audio. He was standing, as always, waiting to review it with the suits, when their phones started ringing like crazy.

“It’s open,” one guy reported. “Somebody opened up 3L.”

Everybody was standing now, trying to see. Jimmy the Bishop looked out from the tower cab at the lit-up plane. The door did not look open from up here.

Calvin Buss said, “From the inside? Who’s coming out?”

The guy shook his head, still on his phone. “No one. Not yet.”

Jimmy the Bishop grabbed a small pair of birders off the ledge and checked out Regis 753 for himself.

There it was. A sliver of black over the wing. A seam of shadow, like a tear in the hull of the aircraft.

Jimmy’s mouth went dry at the sight. Those doors pull out slightly when first unlocked, then swivel back and fold against the interior wall. So, technically, all that had happened was that the airlock had been disengaged. The door wasn’t quite open yet.

He set the field glasses back on the ledge and backed away. For some reason, his mind was telling him that this would be a good time to run.

Taxiway Foxtrot

THE GAS AND RADIATION SENSORS lifted to the door crack both read clear. An emergency service unit officer lying on the wing managed to pull out the door a few extra inches with a long, hooked pole, two other armed tactical officers covering him from the tarmac below. A parabolic microphone was inserted, returning all manner of chirps, beeps, and ring tones: the passengers’ mobile phones going unanswered. Eerie and plaintive sounding, like tiny little personal distress alarms.

They then inserted a mirror attached at the end of a pole, a large-size version of the sort of dental instrument used to examine back teeth. All they could see were the two jump seats inside the between-classes area, both unoccupied.

Bullhorn commands got them nowhere. No response from inside the aircraft: no lights, no movement, no nothing.

Two ESU officers in light body armor stood back from the taxiway lights for a briefing. They viewed a cross-section schematic, showing passengers seated ten abreast inside the coach cabin they would be entering: three each on the row sides and four across the middle. Airplane interior was tight, and they traded their H-K submachine guns for more manageable Glock 17s, preparing for close combat.

They strapped on radio-enabled gas masks fitted with flip-down night-vision specs, and snapped mace, zip cuffs, and extra magazine pouches to their belts. Q-tip – size cameras, also with passive infrared lenses, were mounted onto the tops of their ESU helmets.

They went up the fire rescue ladder onto the wing, and advanced to the door. They pulled up flat against the fuselage on either side of it, one man folding the door back against the interior wall with his boot, then curling inside, low and straight ahead to a near partition, staying down on his haunches. His partner followed him aboard.

The bullhorn spoke for them:

“Occupants of Regis 753. This is the New York – New Jersey Port Authority. We are entering the aircraft. For your own safety, please remain seated and lace your fingers on top of your heads.”

The lead man waited with his back to the partition, listening. His mask dulled sound into a jarlike roar, but he could discern no movement inside. He flipped down his NVD and the interior of the plane went pea-soup green. He nodded to his partner, readied his Glock, and on a three count swept into the wide cabin.

NOW BOARDING

Worth Street, Chinatown

Ephraim Goodweather couldn’t tell if the siren he heard was blaring out in the street—which is to say, real—or part of the sound track of the video game he was playing with his son, Zack.

“Why do you keep killing me?” asked Eph.

The sandy-haired boy shrugged, as though offended by the question. “That’s the whole point, Dad.”

The television stood next to the broad west-facing window, far and away the best feature of this tiny, second-story walk-up on the southern edge of Chinatown. The coffee table before them was cluttered with open cartons of Chinese food, a bag of comics from Forbidden Planet, Eph’s mobile phone, Zack’s mobile phone, and Zack’s smelly feet. The game system was new, another toy purchased with Zack in mind. Just as his grandmother used to juice the inside of an orange half, so did Eph try to squeeze every last bit of fun and goodness out of their limited time together. His only son was his life, was his air and water and food, and he had to load up on him when he could, because sometimes a week could pass with only a phone call or two, and it was like going a week without seeing the sun.

“What the …” Eph thumbed his controller, this foreign feeling wireless gadget in his hand, still hitting all the wrong buttons. His soldier was punching the ground. “At least let me get up.”

“Too late. Dead again.”

For a lot of other guys Eph knew, men in a situation similar to his own, their divorce seemed to have been as much from their children as from their wives. Sure, they would talk the talk, how they missed their kids, and how their ex-wives kept subverting their relationship, blah, blah, but the effort never really seemed to be there. A weekend with their kids became a weekend out of their new life of freedom. For Eph, these weekends with Zack were his life. Eph had never wanted the divorce. Still didn’t. He acknowledged that his married life with Kelly was over—she had made her position perfectly clear to him—but he refused to relinquish his claim on Zack. The boy’s custody was the only unresolved issue, the sole reason they still remained wed in the eyes of the state.

This was the last of Eph’s trial weekends, as stipulated by their court-appointed family counselor. Zack would be interviewed sometime next week, and soon afterward a final determination would be made. Eph didn’t care that it was a long shot, his getting custody; this was the fight of his life. Do the right thing for Zack formed the crux of Kelly’s guilt trip, pushing Eph to settle for generous visitation rights. But the right thing for Eph was to hang on to Zack. Eph had twisted the arm of the U.S. government, his employer, in order to set up his team here in New York instead of Atlanta, where the CDC was located, just so that Zack’s life would not be disrupted any more than it had been already.

He could have fought harder. Dirtier. As his lawyer had advised him to, many times. That man knew the tricks of the divorce trade. One reason Eph could not bring himself to do so was his lingering melancholy over the failure of the marriage. The other was that Eph had too much mercy in him—that what indeed made him a terrific doctor was the very same thing that made him a pitiful divorce-case client. He had conceded to Kelly almost every demand and financial claim her lawyer requested. All he wanted was time alone with his only son.

Who right now was lobbing grenades at him.

Eph said, “How can I shoot back when you’ve blown off my arms?”

“I don’t know. Maybe try kicking?”

“Now I know why your mother doesn’t let you own a game system.”

“Because it makes me hyper and antisocial and … OH, FRAGGED YOU!”

Eph’s life-capacity bar diminished to zero.

That was when his mobile phone started vibrating, skittering up against the take-out cartons like a hungry silver beetle. Probably Kelly, reminding him to make sure Zack used his asthma inhaler. Or just checking up on him, making sure he hadn’t whisked Zack away to Morocco or something.

Eph caught it, checked the screen. A 718 number, local. Caller ID read JFK QUARANTINE.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintained a quarantine station inside the international terminal at JFK. Not a detainment or even a treatment facility, just a few small offices and an examining room: a way station, a firebreak to identify and perhaps stall an outbreak from threatening the general population of the United States. Most of their work involved isolating and evaluating passengers taken ill in flight, occasionally turning up a diagnosis of meningococcal meningitis or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

The office was closed evenings, and Eph was not to be on call tonight, or anywhere on the depth chart through Monday morning. He had cleared his work schedule weeks ago, in advance of his weekend with Zack.

He clicked off the vibrate button and set the mobile back down next to the carton of scallion pancakes. Somebody else’s problem. “It’s the kid who sold me this thing,” he told Zack. “Calling to heckle me.”

Zack was eating another steamed dumpling. “I cannot believe you got Yankees – Red Sox tickets for tomorrow.”

“I know. Good seats too. Third-base side. Tapped into your college fund to get them, but hey, don’t worry—with your skills, you’ll go far on just a high school degree.”

“Dad.”

“Anyway, you know how it pains me to put even one green dollar in Steinbrenner’s pocket. This is essentially treason.”

Zack said, “Boo, Red Sox. Go, Yanks.”

“First you kill me, then you taunt me?”

“I figured, as a Red Sox fan, you’d be used to it.”

“That’s it—!” Eph wrapped up his son, working his hands in along his ticklish rib cage, the boy bucking as he convulsed with laughter. Zack was getting stronger, his squirming possessed of real force: this boy who he used to fly around the room on one shoulder. Zachary had his mother’s hair, both in its sandy color (her original color, the way it was when he first met her in college) and fine texture. And yet, to Eph’s amazement and joy, he recognized his own eleven-year-old hands dangling uncannily from the boy’s wrists. The very same broad—knuckled hands that used to want to do nothing more than rub up baseball cowhide, hands that hated piano lessons, that could not wait to get a grip on this world of adults. Uncanny, seeing those young hands again. It was true: our children do come to replace us. Zachary was like a perfect human package, his DNA written with everything Eph and Kelly once were to each other—their hopes, dreams, potential. This was probably why each of them worked so hard, in his and her own contradictory ways, to bring out his very best. So much so that the thought of Zack being brought up under the influence of Kelly’s live-in boyfriend, Matt—a “nice” guy, a “good” guy, but so middle of the road as to be practically invisible—kept Eph up at night. He wanted challenge for his son, he wanted inspiration, greatness! The battle for the custody of Zack’s person was settled, but not the battle for the custody of Zack’s spirit—for his very soul.

Eph’s mobile started vibrating again, crabbing across the tabletop like the chattering gag teeth his uncles used to give him for Christmas. The awakened device interrupted their roughhousing, Eph releasing Zack, fighting the impulse to check the display. Something was happening. The calls wouldn’t have come through to him otherwise. An outbreak. An infected traveler.

Eph made himself not pick up the phone. Someone else had to handle it. This was his weekend with Zack. Who was looking at him now.

“Don’t worry,” said Eph, putting the mobile back down on the table, the call going to his voice mail. “Everything’s taken care of. No work this weekend.”

Zack nodded, perking up, finding his controller. “Want some more?”

“I don’t know. When do we get to the part where the little Mario guy starts rolling barrels down at the monkey?”

“Dad.”

“I’m just more comfortable with little Italian stereotypes running around gobbling up mushrooms for points.”

“Right. And how many miles of snow was it you had to trudge through to get to school each day?”

“That’s it—!”

Eph fell on him again, the boy ready for him this time, clamping his elbows tight, foiling his rib attack. So Eph changed strategy, going instead for the ultrasensitive Achilles tendon, wrestling with Zack’s heels while trying hard not to get kicked in the face. The boy was begging for mercy when Eph realized his mobile was vibrating yet again.

Eph jumped up this time, angry, knowing now that his job, his vocation, was going to pull him away from his son tonight. He glanced at the caller ID, and this time the number bore an Atlanta prefix. Very bad news. Eph closed his eyes and pressed the humming phone to his forehead, clearing his mind. “Sorry, Z,” he told Zack. “Just let me see what’s up.”

He took the phone into the adjoining kitchen, where he answered it.

“Ephraim? It’s Everett Barnes.”

Dr. Everett Barnes. The director of the CDC.

Eph’s back was to Zack. He knew Zack was watching and couldn’t bear to look at him. “Yes, Everett, what is it?”

“I just got the call from Washington. Your team is en route to the airport now?”

“Ah, sir, actually—”

“You saw it on TV?”

“TV?”

He went back to the sofa, showing Zack his open hand, a plea for patience. Eph found the remote and searched it for the correct button or combination of buttons, tried a few, and the screen went blank. Zack took the remote from his hand and sullenly switched to cable.

The news channel showed an airplane parked on the tarmac. Support vehicles formed a wide, perhaps fearful, perimeter. JFK International Airport. “I think I see it, Everett.”

“Jim Kent just reached me, he’s pulling the equipment your Canary team needs. You are the front line on this, Ephraim. They’re not to make another move until you get there.”

“They who, sir?”

“The Port Authority of New York, the Transportation Security Administration. The National Transportation Safety Board and Homeland Security are winging there now.”

The Canary project was a rapid-response team of field epidemiologists organized to detect and identify incipient biological threats. Its purview included both naturally occurring threats, such as viral and rickettsial diseases found in nature, and man-made outbreaks—although most of their funding came thanks to Canary’s obvious bioterrorism applications. New York City was the nerve center, with smaller, university-hospital-based satellite Canaries up and running in Miami, Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago.

The program drew its name from the old coal miner’s trick of bringing a caged canary underground as a crude yet efficient biological early warning system. The bright yellow bird’s highly sensitive metabolism detected methane and carbon monoxide gas traces before they reached toxic or even explosive levels, causing the normally chirpy creature to fall silent and sway on its perch.

In this modern age, every human being had the potential to be that sentinel canary. Eph’s team’s job was to isolate them once they stopped singing, treat the infected, and contain the spread.

Eph said, “What is it, Everett? Did somebody die on the plane?”

The director said, “They’re all dead, Ephraim. Every last one.”

Kelton Street, Woodside, Queens

KELLY GOODWEATHER sat at the small table across from Matt Sayles, her live-in partner (“boyfriend” sounded too young; “significant other” sounded too old). They were sharing a homemade pizza made with pesto sauce, sun-dried tomatoes, and goat cheese, with a few curls of prosciutto thrown in for flair, as well as an eleven-dollar bottle of year-old merlot. The kitchen television was tuned to NY1 because Matt wanted the news. As far as Kelly was concerned, twenty-four-hour news channels were her enemy.

“I am sorry,” she told him again.

Matt smiled, making a lazy circle in the air with his wineglass.

“It’s not my fault, of course. But I know we had this weekend set up all to ourselves …”

Matt wiped his lips on the napkin tucked into his shirt collar. “He usually finds a way to get in between the two of us. And I am not referring to Zack.”

Kelly looked over at the empty third chair. Matt had no doubt been looking forward to her son’s weekend away. Pending resolution of their drawn-out, court-mediated custody battle, Zack was spending a few weekends with Eph at his flat in Lower Manhattan. That meant, for her, an intimate dinner at home, with the usual sexual expectations on Matt’s part—which Kelly had no qualms about fulfilling, and was inevitably worth the extra glass of wine she would allow herself.

But now, not tonight. As sorry as she was for Matt, for herself she was actually quite pleased.

“I’ll make it up to you,” she told him, with a wink.

Matt smiled in defeat. “Deal.”

This was why Matt was such a comfort. After Eph’s moodiness, his outbursts, his hard-driving personality, the mercury that ran through his veins, she needed a slower boat like Matt. She had married Eph much too young, and deferred too much of herself—her own needs, ambitions, desires—helping him advance his medical career. If she could impart one bit of life advice to the fourth-grade girls in her class at PS 69 in Jackson Heights, it would be: never marry a genius. Especially a good-looking one. With Matt, Kelly felt at ease, and, in fact, enjoyed the upper hand in the relationship. It was her turn to be tended to.

On the small white kitchen television, they were hyping the next day’s eclipse. The reporter was trying on various glasses, rating them for eye safety, while reporting from a T-shirt stand in Central Park. KISS ME ON THE ECLIPSE! was the big seller. The anchors promoted their “Live Team Coverage” coming tomorrow afternoon.

“It’s gonna be a big show,” said Matt, his comment letting her know he wasn’t going to let disappointment ruin the evening.

“It’s a major celestial event,” said Kelly, “and they’re treating it like just another winter snowstorm.”

The “Breaking News” screen came on. This was usually Kelly’s cue to change the channel, but the strangeness of the story drew her in. The TV showed a distant shot of an airplane sitting on the tarmac at JFK, encircled by work lights. The plane was lit so dramatically, and surrounded by so many vehicles and small men, you would have thought a UFO had touched down in Queens.

“Terrorists,” said Matt.

JFK Airport was only ten miles away. The reporter said that the airplane in question had completely shut down after an otherwise unremarkable landing, and that there had as yet been no contact either from the flight crew or the passengers still aboard. All landings at JFK had been suspended as a precaution, and air traffic was being diverted to Newark and LaGuardia.

She knew then that this airplane was the reason Eph was bringing Zack back home. All she wanted now was to get Zack back under her roof. Kelly was one of the great worriers, and home meant safety. It was the one place in this world that she could control.

Kelly rose and went to the window over her kitchen sink, dimming the light, looking out at the sky beyond the roof of their backyard neighbor. She saw airplane lights circling LaGuardia, swirling like bits of glittering debris pulled into a storm funnel. She had never been out in the middle part of the country, where you can see tornadoes coming at you from miles away. But this felt like that. Like there was something coming her way that she could do nothing about.

Eph pulled up his CDC-issued Ford Explorer at the curb. Kelly owned a small house on a tidy square of land surrounded by neat, low hedges in a sloping block of two-story houses. She met him outside on the concrete walk, as though wary of admitting him into her domicile, generally treating him like a decade-long flu she had finally fought off.

Blonder and slender and still very pretty, though she was a different person to him now. So much had changed. Somewhere, in a dusty shoe box probably, buried in the back of a closet, there were wedding photos of an untroubled young woman with her veil thrown back, smiling winningly at her tuxedoed groom, two young people very happily in love.

“I had the entire weekend cleared,” he said, exiting the car ahead of Zack, pushing through the low iron gate in order to get in the first word. “It’s an emergency.”

Matt Sayles stepped out through the lighted doorway behind her, stopping on the front stoop. His napkin was tucked into his shirt, obscuring the Sears logo over the pocket from the store he managed at the mall in Rego Park.

Eph didn’t acknowledge his presence, keeping his focus on Kelly and Zack as the boy entered the yard. Kelly had a smile for him, and Eph couldn’t help but wonder if she preferred this—Eph striking out with Zack—to a weekend alone with Matt. Kelly took him protectively under her arm. “You okay, Z?”

Zack nodded.

“Disappointed, I bet.”

He nodded again.

She saw the box and wires in his hand. “What is this?”

Eph said, “Zack’s new game system. He’s borrowing it for the weekend.” Eph looked at Zack, the boy’s head against his mother’s chest, staring into the middle distance. “Bud, if there’s any way I can get free, maybe tomorrow—hopefully tomorrow … but if there’s any way at all, I’ll be back for you, and we’ll salvage what we can out of this weekend. Okay? I’ll make it up to you, you know that, right?”

Zack nodded, his eyes still distant.

Matt called down from the top step. “Come on in, Zack. Let’s see if we can get that thing hooked up.”

Dependable, reliable Matt. Kelly sure had him trained well. Eph watched his son go inside under Matt’s arm, Zack glancing back one last time at Eph.

Alone now, he and Kelly stood facing each other on the little patch of grass. Behind her, over the roof of her house, the lights of the waiting airplanes circled. An entire network of transportation, never mind various government and law enforcement agencies, was waiting for this man facing a woman who said she didn’t love him anymore.

“It’s that airplane, isn’t it.”

Eph nodded. “They’re all dead. Everybody on board.”

“All dead?” Kelly’s eyes flared with concern. “How? What could it be?”

“That’s what I have to go find out.”

Eph felt the urgency of his job settling over him now. He had blown it with Zack—but that was done, and now he had to go. He reached into his pocket and handed her an envelope with the pin-striped logo. “For tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “In case I don’t make it back before then.”

Kelly peeked at the tickets, her eyebrows lifting at the price, then tucked them back inside the envelope. She looked at him with an expression approaching sympathy. “Just be sure not to forget our meeting with Dr. Kempner.”

The family therapist—the one who would decide Zack’s final custody. “Kempner, right,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

“And—be careful,” she said.

Eph nodded and started away.

JFK International Airport

A CROWD HAD GATHERED outside the airport, people drawn to the unexplained, the weird, the potentially tragic, the event. The radio, on Eph’s drive over, treated the dormant airplane as a potential hijacking, speculating about a link to the conflicts overseas.

Inside the terminal, two airport carts passed Eph, one carrying a teary mother holding the hands of two frightened-looking children, another with an older black gentleman riding with a bouquet of red roses across his lap. He realized that somebody else’s Zack was out there on that plane. Somebody else’s Kelly. He focused on that.

Eph’s team was waiting for him outside a locked door just below gate 6. Jim Kent was working the phone, as usual, speaking into the wire microphone dangling from his ear. Jim handled the bureaucratic and political side of disease control for Eph. He closed his hand around the mic part of his phone wire and said, by way of greeting, “No other reports of planes down anywhere else in the country.”

Eph climbed in next to Nora Martinez in the back of the airline cart. Nora, a biochemist by training, was his number two in New York. Her hands were already gloved, the nylon barrier as pale and smooth and mournful as lilies. She shifted over a little for him as he sat down. He regretted the awkwardness between them.

They started to move, Eph smelling marsh salt in the wind. “How long was the plane on the ground before it went dark?”

Nora said, “Six minutes.”

“No radio contact? Pilot’s out too?”

Jim turned and said, “Presumed, but unconfirmed. Port Authority cops went into the passenger compartment, found it full of corpses, and got right out again.”

“They were masked and gloved, I hope.”

“Affirmative.”

The cart turned a corner, revealing the airplane waiting in the distance. A massive aircraft, work lights trained on it from multiple angles, shining as bright as day. Mist off the nearby bay created a glowing aura around the fuselage.

“Christ,” said Eph.

Jim said, “A ‘triple seven,’ they call it. The 777, the world’s largest twin jet. Recent design, new aircraft. Why they’re flipped out about the equipment going down. They think it’s something more like sabotage.”

The landing-gear tires alone were enormous. Eph looked up at the black hole that was the open door over the broad left wing.

Jim said, “They already tested for gas. They tested for everything man-made. They don’t know what else to do but start from scratch.”

Eph said, “Us being the scratch.”

This dormant aircraft mysteriously full of dead people was the HAZMAT equivalent of waking up one day and finding a lump on your back. Eph’s team was the biopsy lab charged with telling the Federal Aviation Administration whether or not it had cancer.

Blue-blazer-wearing TSA officials pounced on Eph as soon as the cart stopped, trying to give him the same briefing Jim had just had. Asking him questions and talking over each other like reporters.

“This has gone on too long,” said Eph. “Next time something unexplained like this happens, you call us second. HAZMAT first, us second. Got it?”

“Yes, sir, Dr. Goodweather.”

“Is HAZMAT ready?”

“Standing by.”

Eph slowed before the CDC van. “I will say that this doesn’t read like a spontaneous contagious event. Six minutes on the ground? The time element is too short.”

“It has to be a deliberate act,” said one of the TSA officials.

“Perhaps,” said Eph. “As it stands now, in terms of whatever might be awaiting us in there—we have containment.” He opened the rear door of the van for Nora. “We’ll suit up and see what we’ve got.”

A voice stopped him. “We have one of our own on this plane.”

Eph turned back. “One of whose?”

“A federal air marshal. Standard on international flights involving U.S. carriers.”

“Armed?” Eph said.

“That’s the general idea.”

“No phone call, no warning from him?”

“No nothing.”

“It must have overpowered them immediately.” Eph nodded, looking into these men’s worried faces. “Get me his seat assignment. We’ll start there.”

Eph and Nora ducked inside the CDC van, closing the rear double doors, shutting out the anxiety of the tarmac behind them.

They pulled Level A HAZMAT gear down off the rack. Eph stripped down to his T-shirt and shorts, Nora to a black sports bra and lavender panties, each accommodating the other’s elbows and knees inside the cramped Chevy van. Nora’s hair was thick and dark and defiantly long for a field epidemiologist, and she swept it up into a tight elastic, arms working purposefully and fast. Her body was gracefully curved, her flesh the warm tone of lightly browned toast.

After Eph’s separation from Kelly became permanent and she initiated divorce proceedings, Eph and Nora had a brief fling. It was just one night, followed by a very awkward and uncomfortable morning after, which dragged on for months and months … right up until their second fling, just a few weeks ago—which, while even more passionate than the first, and full of intention to avoid the pitfalls that had overwhelmed them the first time, had led again to another protracted and awkward détente.

In a way, he and Nora worked too closely: if they had anything resembling normal jobs, a traditional workplace, the result might have been different, might have been easier, more casual, but this was “love in the trenches,” and with each of them giving so much to Canary, they had little left for each other, or the rest of the world. A partnership so voracious that nobody asked, “How was your day?” in the downtime—mainly because there was no downtime at all.

Such as here. Getting practically naked in front of each other in the least sexual way possible. Because donning a bio-suit is the antithesis of sensuality. It is the converse of allure, it is a withdrawal into prophylaxis, into sterility.

The first layer was a white Nomex jumpsuit, emblazoned on the back with the initials CDC. It zipped from knee to chin, the collar and cuffs sealing it in snug Velcro, black jump boots lacing up to the shins.

The second layer was a disposable white suit made of papery Tyvek. Then booties pulled on over boots, and Silver Shield chemical protective gloves over nylon barriers, taped at the wrists and ankles. Then lifted on self-contained breathing apparatus gear: a SCBA harness, lightweight titanium pressure-demand tank, full-face respirator mask, and personal alert safety system (PASS) device with a firefighter’s distress alarm.

Each hesitated before pulling the mask over his or her face. Nora formed a half smile and cupped Eph’s cheek in her hand. She kissed him. “You okay?”

“Yup.”

“You sure don’t look it. How was Zack?”

“Sulky. Pissed. As he should be.”

“Not your fault.”

“So what? Bottom line is, this weekend with my son is gone, and I’ll never get it back.” He readied his mask. “You know, there came a point in my life where things came down to either my family or my job. I thought I chose family. Apparently, not enough.”

There are moments like these, which usually come at the most inconvenient of times, such as a crisis, when you look at someone and realize that it will hurt you to be without them. Eph saw how unfair he had been to Nora by clinging to Kelly—not even to Kelly, but to the past, to his dead marriage, to what once was, all for Zack’s sake. Nora liked Zack. And Zack liked her, that was obvious.

But now, right now, was not the time to get into this. Eph pulled on his respirator, checking his breathing tank. The outer layer consisted of a yellow—canary yellow—full encapsulation “space” suit, featuring a sealed hood, a 210-degree viewport, and attached gloves. This was the actual level A containment suit, the “contact suit,” twelve layers of fabric which, once sealed, absolutely insulated the wearer from the outside atmosphere.

Nora checked his seal, and he did hers. Biohazard investigators operate on a buddy system much the same as that of scuba divers. Their suits puffed a bit from the circulated air. Sealing out pathogens meant trapping sweat and body heat, and the temperature inside their suits could rise up to thirty degrees higher than room temperature.

“Looks tight,” said Eph, over the voice-actuated microphones inside his mask.

Nora nodded, catching his eye through their respective masks. The glance went on a moment too long, as if she was going to say something else, then changed her mind. “You ready?” she said.

Eph nodded. “Let’s do this.”

Outside on the tarmac, Jim switched on his wheeled command console and picked up both their mask-mounted cameras, on separate monitor feeds. He attached small, switched-on flashlights on lanyards from their pull-away shoulder straps: the thickness of the multilayered suit gloves limited the wearer’s fine-motor skills.

The TSA guys came up and tried to talk to them some more, but Eph feigned deafness, shaking his head and touching his hood.

As they approached the airplane, Jim showed Eph and Nora a laminated printout containing an overhead view of the interior seat assignments, numbers corresponding to passenger and crew manifests listed on the back. He pointed to a red dot at 18A.

“The federal air marshal,” Jim said into his microphone. “Last name Charpentier. Exit row, window seat.”

“Got it,” Eph said.

A second red dot. “TSA pointed out this other passenger of interest. A German diplomat on the flight, Rolph Hubermann, business class, second row, seat F. In town for UN Council talks on the Korean situation. Might have been carrying one of those diplomatic pouches that get a free pass at customs. Could be nothing, but there is a contingent of Germans on their way here right now, from the UN, just to retrieve it.”

“Okay.”

Jim left them at the edge of the lights, turning back to his monitors. Inside the perimeter, it was brighter than day. They moved nearly without shadow. Eph led the way up the fire engine ladder onto the wing, then along its broadening surface to the opened door.

Eph entered first. The stillness was palpable. Nora followed, standing with him shoulder to shoulder at the head of the middle cabin.

Seated corpses faced them, in row after row. Eph’s and Nora’s flashlight beams registered dully in the dead jewels of their open eyes.

No nosebleeds. No bulging eyes or bloated, mottled skin. No foaming or bloody discharge about the mouth. Everyone in his or her seat, no sign of panic or struggle. Arms hanging loose into the aisle or else sagged in laps. No evident trauma.

Mobile phones—in laps, pockets, and muffled inside carry-on bags—emitted waiting message beeps or else rang anew, the peppy tones overlapping. These were the only sounds.

They located the air marshal in the window seat just inside the open door. A man in his forties with black, receding hair, dressed in a baseball-style button-up shirt with blue and orange piping, New York Mets colors, the baseball-headed mascot Mr. Met depicted on the front, and blue jeans. His chin rested on his chest, as though he were napping with his eyes open.

Eph dropped to one knee, the wider exit row giving him room to maneuver. He touched the air marshal’s forehead, pushing back the man’s head, which moved freely on his neck. Nora, next to him, teased her flashlight beam in and out of his eyes, Charpentier’s pupils showing no response. Eph pulled down on his chin, opening his jaw and illuminating the inside of his mouth, his tongue and the top of his throat looking pink and unpoisoned.

Eph needed more light. He reached over and slid open the window shade, and construction light blasted inside like a bright white scream.

No vomit, as from gas inhalation. Victims of carbon monoxide poisoning evinced distinct skin blistering and discoloration, leaving them with a bloated, leathered appearance. No discomfort in his posture, no sign of agonal struggle. Next to him sat a middle-aged woman in resort-style travel wear, half-glasses perched on her nose before her unseeing eyes. They were seated as any normal passengers would be, chairs in the full and upright position, still waiting for the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign to be turned off at the airport gate.

Front-exit-row passengers stow their personal belongings in mesh containers bolted to the facing cabin wall. Eph pulled a soft Virgin Atlantic bag out of the pocket before Charpentier, running the zipper back along the top. He pulled out a Notre Dame sweatshirt, a handful of well-thumbed puzzle books, an audio-book thriller, then a nylon pouch that was kidney shaped and heavy. He unzipped it just far enough to see the all-black, rubber-coated handgun inside.

“You seeing this?” said Eph.

“We see it,” said Jim over the radio. Jim, TSA, and anyone else with enough rank to get near the monitors were watching this whole thing on Eph’s shoulder-mounted camera.

Eph said, “Whatever it was, it took everyone completely unaware. Including the air cop.”

Eph zipped the bag closed and left it on the floor, straightening, then proceeding down the aisle. Eph reached across the dead passengers in order to raise every second or third window shade, the harsh light casting weird shadows and throwing their faces into sharp relief, like travelers who had perished by flying too close to the sun.

The phones kept singing, the dissonance becoming shrill, like dozens of personal distress alarms overlapping. Eph tried not to think about the concerned callers on the other end.

Nora moved close to a body. “No trauma at all,” she noted.

“I know,” said Eph. “Goddamn spooky.” He faced the gallery of corpses, thinking. “Jim,” he said, “get an alert out to WHO Europe. Bring in Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health on this, contacting hospitals. On the off chance this thing is transmissible, they should be seeing it there too.”

“I’m on it,” said Jim.

In the forward galley between business and first, four flight attendants—three female, one male—sat buckled into their jump seats, bodies pitched forward against their shoulder belts. Moving past them, Eph had the sensation of floating through a shipwreck underwater.

Nora’s voice came through. “I’m at the rear of the plane, Eph. No surprises. Coming back now.”

“Okay,” said Eph as he walked back through the window-lit cabin, opening the segregating curtain to the wider-aisle seats of business class. There, Eph located the German diplomat, Hubermann, sitting on the aisle, near the front. His chubby hands were still folded in his lap, his head slumped, a forelock of sandy silver hair drooped over his open eyes.

The diplomatic pouch Jim mentioned was in the briefcase beneath his seat. It was blue and vinyl with a zipper along the top.

Nora approached him. “Eph, you’re not authorized to open that—”

Eph unzipped it, removing a half-eaten Toblerone bar and a clear plastic bottle full of blue pills.

“What is it?” Nora asked.

“My guess is Viagra,” said Eph, returning the contents to the pouch and the pouch to the briefcase.

He paused next to a mother and young daughter traveling together. The young girl’s hand was still nestled inside her mother’s. Both appeared relaxed.

Eph said, “No panic, no nothing.”

Nora said, “Doesn’t make sense.”

Viruses require transmission, and transmission takes time. Passengers becoming sick or falling unconscious would have caused an uproar, no matter what the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign said. If this was a virus, it was unlike any pathogen Eph had ever encountered in his years as an epidemiologist with the CDC. All signs instead pointed to a lethal poisoning agent introduced into the sealed environment of the airplane cabin.

Eph said, “Jim, I want to retest for gas.”

Jim’s voice said, “They took air samples, measured in parts per million. There was nothing.”

“I know but … it’s as if these people were overcome by something without any warning whatsoever. Maybe the substance dissipated once that door opened. I want to test the carpeting and any other porous surfaces. We’ll test lung tissue once we get these people in post.”

“Okay, Eph—you got it.”

Eph moved quickly past the widely spaced, leather-appointed seats of first class to the closed cockpit door. The door was grated and framed in steel along each edge, with an overhead camera in the ceiling. He reached for the handle.

Jim’s voice in his suit hood said, “Eph, they’re telling me it works on a keypad lock, you won’t be able to get—”

The door pushed open under his gloved hand.

Eph stood very still at the open doorway. The lights from the taxiway shone through the tinted cockpit windshield, illuminating the flight deck. The system displays were all dark.

Jim said, “Eph, they’re saying to be very careful.”

“Tell them thanks for the expert technical advice,” said Eph before moving inside.

The system displays around the switches and throttles were all dark. One man wearing a pilot’s uniform sat slumped in a jump seat to Eph’s immediate right as he entered. Two more, the captain and his first officer, were seated in the twin chairs before the controls. The first officer’s hands lay curled and empty in his lap, his head drooped to the left with his hat still on. The captain’s left hand remained on a control lever, his right arm hanging off the armrest, knuckles brushing the carpeted floor. His head was forward, his hat resting in his lap.

Eph leaned over the control console between the two seats in order to push up the captain’s head. He checked the captain’s open eyes with his flashlight, the pupils fixed and dilated. He eased the man’s head back down gently onto his chest, and then stiffened.

He felt something. He sensed something. A presence.

He stepped back from the console and scanned the flight deck, turning in one complete circle.

Jim said, “What is it, Eph?”

Eph had spent enough time around corpses not to be jumpy. But there was something here … somewhere. Here or nearby.

The strange sensation passed, like a dizzy spell, leaving him blinking. He shook it off. “Nothing. Claustrophobia, probably.”

Eph turned to the third man inside the cockpit. His head hung low, his right shoulder propped up against the side wall. His jump seat harness straps hung down.

Eph said aloud, “Why isn’t he belted in?”

Nora said, “Eph, are you in the cockpit? I’m coming to you.”

Eph looked at the dead man’s silver tie pin with the Regis Air logo. The nameplate over his pocket read REDFERN. Eph dropped to one knee before him, pressing his thickly gloved fingers against the man’s temples to raise his face. His eyes were open and down turned. Eph checked his pupils, and thought he saw something. A glimmer. He looked again, and suddenly Captain Redfern shuddered and emitted a groan.

Eph jerked backward, falling between the two captains’ chairs and against the control console with a clatter. The first officer slumped against him, and Eph pushed back at him, trapped for a moment by the man’s limp, dead weight.

Jim’s voice called to him sharply, “Eph?”

Nora’s voice held a note of panic. “Eph, what is it?”

With a surge of energy, Eph propelled the first officer’s body back into its chair and got to his feet.

Nora said, “Eph, are you all right?”

Eph looked at Captain Redfern, spilled onto the floor now, eyes open and staring. His throat, though, was working, bucking, his open mouth seeming to gag on the air.

Eph said, wide-eyed, “We have a survivor here.”

Nora said, “What?”

“We have a man alive here. Jim, we need a Kurt isolation pod for this man. Brought directly to the wing. Nora?” Eph was talking fast, looking at the pilot twitching on the floor. “We have to go through this entire airplane, passenger by passenger.”

INTERLUDE I Abraham Setrakian

THE OLD MAN STOOD ALONE ON THE CRAMPED SALES floor of his pawnshop on East 118th Street, in Spanish Harlem. An hour after closing and his stomach was rumbling, yet he was reluctant to go upstairs. The gates were all pulled down over the doors and windows, like steel eyelids, the night people having claimed the streets outside. At night, you don’t go out.

He went to the bank of dimmers behind the loan desk, and darkened the store lamp by lamp. He was in an elegiac mood. He looked at his shop, the display cases of chrome and streaked glass. The wristwatches showcased on felt instead of velvet, the polished silver he couldn’t get rid of, the bits of diamond and gold. The full tea sets under glass. The leather coats and now-controversial furs. The new music players that went fast, and the radios and televisions he didn’t bother taking in anymore. And there were, here and there, treasures: a pair of beautiful antique safes (lined with asbestos, but just don’t eat it); a suitcase-size wood-and-steel Quasar VCR from the 1970s; an antique 16mm film projector.

But, on balance, lots of low-turnover junk. A pawnshop is part bazaar, part museum, part neighborhood reliquary. The pawnbroker provides a service no one else can. He is the poor man’s banker, someone people can come to and borrow twenty-five dollars with no concern as to credit history, employment, references. And, in the grip of an economic recession, twenty-five dollars is real money to many people. Twenty-five dollars can mean the difference between shelter or homelessness. Twenty-five dollars can put life-prolonging medicine within reach. So long as a man or woman has collateral, something of value to borrow against, he or she can walk out of his door with cash in hand. Beautiful.

He trudged on upstairs, turning out more lights as he went. He was fortunate to own his building, bought in the early 1970s for seven dollars and change. Okay, maybe not for so little, but not for so much either. They were burning down buildings for heat back then. Knickerbocker Loans and Curios (the name came with the shop) was never a means to wealth for Setrakian, but rather a conduit, a point of entry into the pre-Internet underground marketplace of the crossroads city of the world, for a man interested in Old World tools, artifacts, curios, and other arcana.

Thirty-five years of haggling over cheap jewelry by day, while amassing tools and armaments by night. Thirty-five years of biding his time, of preparation and waiting. Now his time was running out.

At the door, he touched the mezuzah and kissed his crooked, wrinkled fingertips before entering. The ancient mirror in the hallway was so scratched and faded that he had to crane his neck in order to find a reflective patch in which to view himself. His alabaster white hair, starting high up on his creased forehead and sweeping back below his ears and neck, was long overdue for a trim. His face continued to fall, his chin and earlobes and eyes succumbing to that bully named gravity. His hands, so broken and badly mended so many decades before, had curved into arthritic talons that he kept permanently hidden behind wool gloves with cut-off fingertips. Yet, beneath and within this crumbling facade of a man: strength. Fire. Grit.

The secret of his interior wellspring of youth? One simple element.

Revenge.

Many years before, in Warsaw and later in Budapest, there was a man named Abraham Setrakian who had been an esteemed professor of Eastern European literature and folklore. A Holocaust survivor who survived the scandal of marrying a student, and whose field of study took him to some of the darkest corners of the world.

Now, an aged pawnbroker in America, still haunted by unfinished business.

He had good soup left over, delicious chicken soup with kreplach and egg noodles, that a regular had brought him all the way from Liebman’s, in the Bronx. He put the bowl in the microwave and worked at his loose necktie knot with his gnarled fingers. After the beeping, he carried the hot bowl over to the table, pulling a linen napkin—never paper!—from the holder and tucking it snugly into his collar.

Blowing on soup. A ritual of comfort, of reassurance. He remembered his grandmother, his bubbeh—but this was more than mere memory; it was sense, a feeling—blowing on it for him when he was a boy, sitting next to him at the rickety wooden table in the cold kitchen of their house in Romania. Before the troubles. Her old breath stirring the rising steam into his young face, the quiet magic of that simple act. Like blowing life into the child. And now, as he blew, an old man himself, he watched his breath given shape by the steam, and wondered just how many of these respirations he had left.

He took the spoon, one of a drawer full of fancy, mismatched implements, into the crooked fingers of his left hand. Blowing onto the spoon now, rippling the tiny pool of broth there, before taking it into his mouth. Taste came and went, the buds on his tongue dying like old soldiers: the victims of many decades of pipe smoking, a professor’s vice.

He found the thin remote for the outdated Sony TV—a kitchen model finished in white—and the thirteen-inch screen warmed up, further illuminating the room. He rose and walked to the pantry, leaning his hands on the stacks of books squeezing the hallway into a narrow tread of worn rug—books were everywhere, piled high against the walls, many of them read, all of them impossible to part with—and lifting the cover off the cake tin to retrieve the last of the good rye bread he had been saving. He carried the paper-wrapped loaf back to his cushioned kitchen chair, settling heavily, and went about picking off the little bits of mold as he enjoyed another tender sip of the delicious broth.

Slowly, the image on the screen claimed his attention: a jumbo jet parked on a tarmac somewhere, lit up like an ivory piece upon jeweler’s black felt. He pulled on the black-rimmed glasses that hung at his chest, squinting in order to make out the bottom graphic. Today’s crisis was taking place across the river, at JFK Airport.

The old professor watched and listened, focused on the pristine-looking airplane. One minute became two, then three, the room fading around him. He was transfixed—nearly transported—by the news report, the soup spoon still in his no-longer-tremulous hand.

The television image of the dormant airplane played across the lenses of his eyeglasses like a future foretold. The broth in the bowl cooled, its steam fading, dying, the picked-apart slice of rye bread remaining uneaten.

He knew.

Pick-pick-pick.

The old man knew—

Pick-pick-pick.

His malformed hands began to ache. What he saw before him was not an omen—it was an incursion. It was the act itself. The thing he had been waiting for. That he had been preparing for. All his life until now.

Any relief he had felt initially—at not having been outlived by this horror; at getting one last-minute chance at vengeance—was replaced immediately by sharp, painlike fear. The words left his mouth on a gust of steam.

He is here … He is here…

ARRIVAL

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 counter-terrorism 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, tri-petaled biohazard symbol, indicating a real or potential threat to cellular materials or living organisms. Printed warnings read:

ISOLATION AREA:

CONTACT PRECAUTION MANDATORY, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

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 blonde 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:

Yanks 4 Sux 2. gr8t seats, wish u wre here, Z.

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.

OCCULTATION

Approaching Totality

Anticipation grew on the ground as the slender nick in the western side of the sun—the lunar “first contact”—became a creeping blackness, a rounded bite gradually consuming the afternoon sun. At first there was no obvious difference in the quality or quantity of light on the ground. Only the black gouge high in the sky, making a crescent of the normally reliable sun, marked this day as being different from any other.

The term “solar eclipse” is in fact a misnomer. An eclipse occurs when one object passes into a shadow cast by another. In a solar eclipse, the moon does not pass into the sun’s shadow, but instead passes between the sun and the earth, obscuring the sun—causing the shadow. The proper term is “occultation.” The moon occults the sun, casting a small shadow onto the surface of the earth. It is not a solar eclipse, but in fact an eclipse of the earth.

The earth’s distance from the sun is approximately four hundred times the moon’s distance from the earth. In a remarkable coincidence, the diameter of the sun happens to be approximately four hundred times the diameter of the moon. This is why the area of the moon and the sun’s photosphere—its bright disk—appear roughly the same size from the perspective of earth.

A total occultation is possible only when the moon is in its new phase, and near its perigee, its closest distance to the earth. The duration of totality depends upon the orbit of the moon, never to exceed seven minutes and forty seconds. This occultation was due to last exactly four minutes and fifty-seven seconds: just under five minutes of uncanny nighttime in the middle of a beautiful early fall afternoon.

Half-covered now by the new (and otherwise invisible) moon, the still bright sky began to take on a dusky cast: like a sunset, only without any warming of the light. At ground level, the sunlight appeared pale, as though filtered or diffused. Shadows lost their certainty. The world, it seemed, had been put on a dimmer.

As the crescent continued to thin, being consumed by the lunar disk, its smothering brightness blazed as though in a panic. The occultation appeared to gain momentum and a kind of desperate speed as the ground landscape went gray, colors bleeding off the normal spectrum. The western sky darkened faster than the east as the shadow of the moon approached.

The eclipse was to be partial in much of the United States and Canada, achieving totality along only a lengthy, narrow trail measuring ten thousand miles long by one hundred miles wide, describing the moon’s dark umbral shadow upon the earth. The west-to-east course, known as the “path of totality,” began at the horn of Africa and curved up the Atlantic Ocean, ending just west of Lake Michigan, moving at more than one thousand miles per hour.

As the crescent sun continued to narrow, the complexion of the sky became a strangled violet. The darkness in the west gathered strength like a silent, windless storm system, spreading throughout the sky and closing in around the weakened sun, like a great organism succumbing to a corrupting force spreading from within.

The sun grew perilously thin, the view—through safety glasses—like that of a manhole lid being slid shut high above, squeezing out the daylight. The crescent blazed white, then turned to silver in its agonal last moments.

Strange, roving bands of shadow began moving over the ground. Oscillations formed by the refraction of light in the earth’s atmosphere—similar to the effect of light moving on the floor of a swimming pool—writhed like shadowy snakes at the corner of one’s vision. These ghostly tricks of light made the hair stand on the back of every viewer’s neck.

The end came quickly. The last throes were chilling, intense, the crescent shrinking to a curved line, a slicing scar in the sky, then fragmenting into individual pearls of fiery white, representing the last of the sun’s rays seeping through the deepest valleys along the lunar surface. These beads winked and vanished in rapid succession, snuffed out like a dying candle flame drowned in its own black wax. The crimson-colored band that was the chromosphere, the thin upper atmosphere of the sun, flared for a precious, final few seconds—and then the sun was gone.

Totality.

Kelton Street, Woodside, Queens

KELLY GOODWEATHER could not believe how quickly the day went dark. She stood out on the sidewalk, as did the rest of her Kelton Street neighbors—on what was normally, at that time of day, the sunny side of the street—staring up at the darkened sky through the cardboard-framed glasses that had come free with two two-liter bottles of Diet Eclipse soda. Kelly was an educated woman. She understood on an intellectual level what was occurring. And still she felt an almost giddy surge of panic. An impulse to run, to hide. This lining up of celestial bodies, the passing into the shadow of the moon: it reached something deep inside her. Touched the night-frightened animal within.

Others surely felt it. The street had grown quiet at the moment of total eclipse. This weird light they were all standing in. And those wormy shadows that had wriggled on the lawn, just out of their vision, against the sides of the house, like swirling spirits. It was as though a cold wind had blown down the street and not ruffled any hair but had only chilled their insides.

That thing people say to you, after you shiver: Someone just walked over your grave. That was what this whole “occultation” seemed like. Someone or something walking over everyone’s grave at once. The dead moon crossing over the living earth.

And then, looking up: the solar corona. An anti-sun, black and faceless, shining madly around the nothingness of the moon, staring down at the earth with glowing, gossamer white hair. A death’s head.

Her neighbors, Bonnie and Donna, the couple renting next door, stood together with their arms around each other, Bonnie with her hand in the back pocket of Donna’s saggy jeans. “Isn’t it amazing?” Bonnie called, smilingly, over her shoulder.

Kelly could not respond. Didn’t they get it? To her, this was no mere curiosity, no afternoon entertainment. How could anyone not see this as some kind of omen? Astronomical explanations and intellectual reasoning be damned: how could this not mean something? So maybe it had no inherent meaning, per se. It was a simple convergence of orbits. But how could any sentient being not imbue it with some significance, positive or negative, religious or psychic or otherwise? Just because we understand how something works doesn’t necessarily mean we understand it …

They called back to Kelly, alone in front of her house, telling her it was safe now to remove her glasses. “You don’t want to miss this!”

Kelly was not going to remove her glasses. No matter what the television said about it being safe to do during the “totality.” The television also told her she wouldn’t age if she bought expensive creams and pills.

Oohhs and aahhs all up and down the street, a real communal event as people got comfortable with the singularity, embracing the moment. Except for Kelly. What is wrong with me? she wondered.

Part of it was just having seen Eph on TV. He didn’t say much at the press conference, but Kelly could tell by his eyes and the way that he spoke that something was wrong. Really wrong. Something beyond the governor’s and the mayor’s rote assurances. Something beyond the sudden and unexplained deaths of 206 transatlantic passengers.

A virus? A terror attack? A mass suicide?

And now this.

She wanted Zack and Matt home. She wanted them here with her right now. She wanted this solar occultation thing to be over with, and to know that she would never have to experience this feeling again. She looked up through the filtered lenses at the murdering moon in all its dark triumph, worried that she might never see the sun again.

Yankee Stadium, the Bronx

ZACK STOOD ON HIS SEAT next to Matt, who stared at the eclipse with his nose scrunched up and his mouth hanging open like a driver squinting into oncoming traffic. Fifty-thousand-plus Yankees fans wearing special collector’s pin-striped eclipse glasses, on their feet now, faces upturned, looking at the moon that darkened the sky on a perfect afternoon for baseball. All except Zack Goodweather. The eclipse was cool and all, but now he had seen it, and so Zack turned his attention to the dugout. He was trying to see Yankees players. There was Jeter, wearing the same exact specs as Zack, perched on the top step on one knee as though waiting to be announced to hit. Pitchers and catchers were all outside the bullpen, gathered on the right-field grass like anyone else, taking it all in.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Bob Sheppard, the public address announcer, “boys and girls, you may now remove your safety glasses.”

And so they did. Fifty thousand people, nearly in unison. An appreciative gasp went up, then some ballpark applause, then full-out cheering, as though the crowd were trying to lure the unfailingly modest Matsui out of the dugout for a cap tip after slugging one into Monument Park.

In school, Zack had learned that the sun was a 6,000-degree Kelvin thermonuclear furnace, but that its corona, the outer edge, consisting of superheated hydrogen gas—visible from earth only during totality—was unexplainably hotter, its temperature reaching as high as 2,000,000 degrees Kelvin.

What he saw when he removed his glasses was a perfect black disk edged by a thin blaze of crimson, surrounded by an aura of wispy white light. Like an eye: the moon a wide, black pupil; the corona the white of the eye; and the vivid reds bursting from the rim of the pupil—loops of superheated gas erupting from the edge of the sun—the bloodshot veins. Kind of like the eye of a zombie.

Cool.

Zombie Sky. No: Zombies of the Eclipse. Zombies of the Occultation. Occult Zombies from the Planet Moon! Wait—the moon isn’t a planet. Zombie Moon. This could be the concept for the movie he and his friends were going to make this winter. Moon rays during a total earth eclipse transform members of the New York Yankees into brain-slurping zombies—yes! And his buddy Ron looked almost just like a young Jorge Posada. “Hey, Jorge Posada, can I have your autograph … wait, what are you … hey, that’s my … what’s wrong with … your eyes … gah … no … NOOO!!!”

The organ was playing now, and a few of the drunks turned into conductors, waving their arms and exhorting their section to sing along with some corny “I’m Being Followed by a Moon Shadow” song. Baseball crowds rarely need an excuse to make noise. These people would have cheered even if this occultation were an asteroid hurtling toward them.

Wow. Zack realized, with a start, that this was exactly the sort of thing his dad would have said if he were here.

Matt, now admiring his free specs next to him, nudged Zack. “Pretty sweet keepsake, huh? I bet eBay’ll be flooded with these suckers by this time tomorrow.”

Then a drunk guy jostled Matt’s shoulder, sloshing beer onto his shoes. Matt froze a moment, then rolled his eyes at Zack, kind of a What-are-you-going-to-do? face. But he didn’t say or do anything. He didn’t even turn around to look. It occurred to Zack now that he’d never seen Matt drink a beer before, only white or red wine on nights at home with Mom. Zack got the sense then that Matt, for all his enthusiasm about the game, was essentially afraid of the fans sitting around them.

Now Zack really wished his dad were there. He dug Matt’s phone out of his jeans pocket and checked again for a text reply.

Searching for signal, it read. Still no service. Solar flares and radiation distortion messing with radio waves and orbiting satellites; they said that would happen. Zack put the phone away and craned his head toward the field, looking for Jeter again.

International Space Station

TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILES above earth, astronaut Thalia Charles—the American flight engineer on Expedition 18, along with a Russian commander and a French engineer—floated in zero gravity through the vestibule joining the Unity module to the aft hatch of lab mod Destiny. The ISS research facility orbited earth sixteen times each day, or about once every hour and a half, at a speed of seventeen thousand miles per hour. Occultations were no great feat in low earth orbit: blocking the sun with any round object in a window revealed the spectacular corona. Thalia’s interest therefore was not in the alignment of the moon and the sun—from her fast-moving perspective, there was indeed no occultation—but rather the result of this phenomenon upon the slow-rotating earth.

Destiny, the primary research lab on the ISS, measures twenty-eight by fourteen feet—although the interior working space of this cylindrical module, due to the amount of equipment tied down to the squared-off sides, is tighter than that, measuring roughly five humans long by one human across. Every duct, pipe, and wire connection was directly accessible and therefore visible, such that each of Destiny’s four walls looked like the back of a panel-size motherboard. At times Thalia felt like little more than a tiny microprocessor dutifully carrying out computations inside a great space computer.

Thalia walked her hands along the nadir, the “floor” of Destiny—in space there is no up or down—to a broad, lenslike ring studded with bolts. The portal shutter was designed to protect the integrity of the module from micrometeoroids or collisions with orbital debris. She maneuvered her sock-covered feet against a wall grip and manually opened it, revealing the two-foot-diameter optical-quality window.

The blue-white ball of earth came into view.

Thalia’s duty assignment was to point and shoot some earth photos with a hard-mounted Hasselblad camera via remote trigger. But when she first looked out on the planet from her unusual vantage point, what she saw made her shudder. The great black blot that was the shadow of the moon looked like a dead spot on the earth. A dark and threatening flaw in the otherwise healthy blue orb that was home. Most unnerving was that she could see nothing at all within the umbra, the central, darkest part of the moon’s shadow, that entire region disappearing into a black void. It was something like viewing a postdisaster satellite map showing devastation caused by a mighty fire that had consumed New York City, and was now spreading out over a broad patch of the eastern seaboard.

Manhattan

NEW YORKERS CONGREGATED in Central Park, the fifty-five-acre Great Lawn filling up as though for a summertime concert. Those who had set out blankets and lawn chairs earlier in the morning now stood on their feet with the rest, children perched on their fathers’ shoulders, babies cradled in their mother’s arms. Belvedere Castle loomed purple-gray over the park, an eerie touch of the gothic in this pastoral open space dwarfed by the East and West Side high-rises.

The great island metropolis ground to a halt, the stillness of the city at that hour felt by all. It was a blackout vibe, anxious yet communal. The occultation imposed a sort of equality upon the city and its denizens, a five-minute suspension of social stratification. Everyone the same under the sun—or the lack thereof.

Radios played up and down the lawn, people singing along with Z100’s spinning of the seven-minute Bonnie Tyler karaoke favorite “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Along the East Side bridges connecting Manhattan to the rest of the world, people stood next to their stopped vehicles, or sat on the hoods, a few photographers with specially filtered cameras clicking from the walkways.

Many rooftops hosted early cocktail hours, a New Year’s Eve-type celebration dampened, for the moment, by the fearsome spectacle in the sky.

The giant Panasonic Astrovision screen, in night-dim Times Square, simulcast the occultation to the terrestrial masses, the sun’s ghostly corona shimmering over “the crossroads of the world” like a warning from a distant sector of the galaxy, the broadcast interrupted by flickers of distortion.

Emergency 911 and nonemergency 311 systems took a torrent of calls, including a handful from preterm pregnant women reporting early “eclipse-induced” labor. EMTs were dutifully dispatched, even though traffic all over the island was at a virtual standstill.

The twin psychiatric centers on Randall’s Island in the northern East River confined violent patients to their rooms and ordered all blinds drawn. Nonviolent patients were invited to assemble in the blacked-out cafeterias, where they were being shown movies—broad comedies—although, during minutes of the totality, a noticeable few grew restless, anxious to leave the room but unable to articulate why. At Bellevue, the psych ward had already seen an uptick in admittances that morning, in advance of the occultation.

Between Bellevue and the New York University Medical Center, two of the largest hospitals in the world, stood perhaps the ugliest building in all of Manhattan. The headquarters of the chief medical examiner of New York was a misshapen rectangle of sickly turquoise. As the fish truck off-loaded bagged corpses, wheeled on stretchers into the autopsy rooms and walk-in refrigerators in the basement, Gossett Bennett, one of the office’s fourteen medical examiners, stepped outside for a quick break. He could not see the moon-sun from the small park behind the hospital—the building itself was in his way—so he instead watched the watchers. All along FDR Drive, which the park overlooked, people stood between parked cars on the never-idle throughway. The East River beyond was dark, a river of tar reflecting the dead sky. Across the river, a gloom overhung all of Queens, broken only by the glow of the sun’s corona reflected in a few of the highest, west-facing windows, like the white-hot flame of some spectacular chemical-plant blaze.

This is what the beginning of the end of the world will look like, he thought to himself before returning to the M.E.’s office to assist in the cataloging of the dead.

JFK International Airport

THE FAMILIES OF the deceased passengers and crew of Regis Air Flight 753 were encouraged to take a break from paperwork and Red Cross coffee (decaf only for the aggrieved), and walk outside onto the tarmac in the restricted area behind terminal 3. There, with nothing in common but their grief, the hollow-eyed mourners huddled together and faced the eclipse arm in arm—some leaning on others in solidarity, others in need of actual physical support—their faces turned to the dark western sky. They did not know yet that they would be split up soon into four groups and shuttled in school buses to their respective medical examiner’s offices where, one family at a time, they would be invited into a viewing room and shown a postmortem photograph and asked to formally identify their loved one. Only families who demanded to view the actual physical remains would be allowed to do so. They then would be issued hotel room vouchers to the airport Sheraton, where a complimentary dinner buffet would be offered and grief counselors placed at their disposal all night and into the next day.

For now, they stared up at the black disk glowing like a spotlight in reverse, sucking light away from this world and back up to the heavens. This obliterating phenomenon was to them a perfect symbol of their loss at that very moment. To them, the eclipse was the opposite of remarkable. It seemed merely appropriate that the sky and their God would see fit to mark their despair.

Outside the Regis Air maintenance hangar, Nora stood apart from the other investigators, waiting for Eph and Jim to return from the press conference. Her eyes were turned toward the ominous black hole in the sky, but her vision was unfocused. She felt caught up in something she did not understand. As though a strange new foe had arisen. The dead moon eclipsing the living sun. Night occulting day.

A shadow flowed past her then. She detected it as a shimmer from out of the corner of her eye, something like the slithering worm shadows that had undulated over the tarmac just before totality. Something just outside her field of vision, at the very edge of perception. Fleeing the maintenance hangar like a dark spirit. A shadow she felt.

In the split second it took her pupil to move to it, the shadow was gone.

Lorenza Ruiz, the airport baggage-conveyer operator who had been the first to drive out to the dead airplane, found herself haunted by the experience. Standing in the aircraft’s shadow that previous night, Lo couldn’t get it out of her mind. She hadn’t slept at all, tossing and turning, finally rising to pace. A late-night glass of white wine failed to do the trick. It weighed on her like something she could not let go of. When sunrise finally came, she found herself eyeing the clock—in anticipation, she realized, of returning to work. She found she couldn’t wait to get back to JFK. Not out of morbid curiosity. It was the image of that dormant plane, impressed upon her mind like a bright light flashed into her eye. All she knew was that she had to get back to see it again.

Now this eclipse, and for the second time in twenty-four hours, the airport was shut down. This stoppage had been in the planning for months—the FAA had cleared a fifteen-minute window of downtime for airports within the range of the occultation, out of concern for the vision of the pilots, who couldn’t very well wear filtered glasses during takeoff or landing—but still, the math struck her as pretty damning and pretty simple:

Dead Airplane + Solar Eclipse = Not Good.

When the moon snuffed out the sun, like a hand covering up a scream, Lo felt the same electric panic as when she had stood on top of the luggage ramp beneath the belly of the darkened 777. The very same impulse to run, this time coupled with the knowledge that there was absolutely no place to go.

Now she was hearing it again. Same noise she’d been hearing since arriving for her shift, only steadier now, louder. A humming. A droning sound, and the weird thing was, she heard it at the same volume whether she wore her protective headphones or not. Headachelike, in that way. Interior. And yet, like a homing beacon, it strengthened in her mind once she returned to work.

With the fifteen minutes of downtime during the eclipse, she decided to set off on foot in search of the source of the tone, following it. Without any sense of surprise, she now found herself looking at the cordoned-off Regis Air maintenance hangar where the dead 777 was being stored.

The noise sounded like no machine she had ever heard. A churning, almost, a rushing sound, like coursing fluid. Or like the murmur of a dozen voices, a hundred different voices, trying to make sense. Maybe she was picking up radar vibrations in her teeth fillings. There was a group of people out in front, officials gazing up at the blocked sun—but no one else like her, lurking there, bothered by or even cognizant of a hum. So she kept it to herself. And yet, for some weird reason, it felt momentous, being right here, this very moment, hearing the noise and wishing—to salve her curiosity, or was it more than that?—that she could get inside the hangar for another look at the plane. As though seeing the plane would somehow resolve the thrumming in her head.

Then suddenly she felt a charge in the atmosphere, like a breeze changing course, and now—yes—it seemed to her that the source of the noise had moved somewhere off to her right. This sudden change startled her, and she followed it under the negative light of the glowing moon, carrying her headphones and protective glasses in her hand. Dumpsters and storage trailers lay ahead, before a few large box containers, and then some scrub brush and hardy, gray, wind-whipped pine trees, their branches full of snagged trash. Then the hurricane fence, beyond which lay hundreds of acres of scrub wilderness.

Voices. It was more like voices to her now. Trying to rise to one single voice, a word … something.

As Lo neared the trailers, an abrupt rustling in the trees, a lifting, made her leap back. Gray-bellied seagulls, apparently spooked by the eclipse, exploded out of the branches and Dumpsters, like winged shards of glass from a smashed window, scattering in all directions.

The droning voices were sharper now, grown almost painful. Calling on her. Like a chorus of the damned, the cacophony rising from a whisper to a roar and back again, struggling to articulate one word, sounding like, as best she could make out:

“…… hhrrhhrrhhrrhhrrhhrrHERE.”

She set down her headphones on the edge of the tarmac, hanging on to her filtered glasses for when the eclipse ended. She veered away from the Dumpsters and their rank garbage smell, instead going toward the large storage trailers. The sound seemed to be emanating not from inside the trailers, but maybe from behind them.

She walked between two six-foot-tall containers and around an old decaying airplane tire, coming upon another row of older, pale green containers. Now she felt it. Not just heard the thrum but felt it, a nest of voices vibrating in her head and in her chest. Beckoning to her. She placed her hand on the containers but felt no pulsation there, then continued forward, slowing at the corner, leaning out.

Set on top of the blown trash and uncut, sun-bleached grass was a large, ancient-looking, ornately carved black wooden box. She ventured into the small clearing, wondering why someone would throw such an obviously well-maintained antique all the way back here. Theft—organized and otherwise—was a fact of life at the airport; maybe someone had stashed it here, planning to swing by later to pick it up.

Then she noticed the cats. The outer airport was crawling with wild cats. Some of them were pets who had escaped their transport cages. Many had simply been released onto airport property by locals looking to get rid of unwanted pets. Worst of all were the travelers who abandoned their cats at the airport rather than pay high kennel fees. Domestic cats who did not know how to fend for themselves in the wild, and who, if they avoided becoming prey to larger animals and survived, joined the colony of feral cats roaming the hundreds of acres of undeveloped airport property.

The skinny cats all sat on their hindquarters, facing the cabinet. A few dozen of these mangy, dirty felines—until Lo looked at the trash-strewn tree and along the hurricane fence, and saw that there were in fact close to a hundred of these feral cats, sitting and facing the wooden box, paying her no attention.

The box wasn’t vibrating, wasn’t emitting the noise she had been attuned to. She was mystified, after coming all this way, to discover something this strange here on the outskirts of the airport—and that was not, in fact, the source she was seeking. The thrumming chorus went on. Were the cats tuned in to it as well? No. Their focus was on the closed cabinet.

She was starting to back away when the cats stiffened. The fur along their backs prickled—each of them, all at once. Their scabby heads all turned her way, one hundred pairs of wild cat eyes staring at her in the gloaming night-day. Lo froze, fearing an attack—and then a darkness fell over her, like a second eclipse.

The cats turned and ran. They fled the clearing, claws grabbing willy-nilly at the high fence or scrambling through predug holes beneath it.

Lo could not turn. She felt a rush of heat from behind her, as from an oven door when you open it. A presence. As she tried to move, the sounds in her head coalesced into one single horrible voice.

“HERE.”

And then she was lifted off the ground.

When the legion of cats returned, they discovered her body with its head crushed, cast deep into their side of the hurricane fence like so much litter. The gulls had found her first—but the cats quickly scared them off and got right to work, hungrily shredding her clothes to get to the feast within.

Knickerbocker Loans and Curios, East 118th Street, Spanish Harlem

THE OLD MAN SAT BEFORE the three adjacent windows at the western end of his dimmed apartment, gazing up at the occluded sun.

Five minutes of night in the middle of the day. The greatest naturally occurring celestial event in four centuries.

The timing could not be ignored.

But to what purpose?

Urgency seized him like a fevered hand. He had not opened the shop that day, instead spending the hours since daybreak hauling things up from his basement workshop. Items and curiosities he had acquired over the years …

Tools of forgotten function. Rare implements of obscure origin. Weapons of lost provenance.

Why he sat here tired now, his gnarled hands aching. No one else but he could foresee what was coming. What was—by every indication—already here.

No one else who would believe him.

Goodfellow. Or Goodwilling. Whatever was the last name of that man who had spoken at the otherwise ridiculous news conference on the television, standing next to the doctor in the navy uniform. How cautiously optimistic all the others had seemed. Exulting over the four survivors, while claiming not to know the final tally of all the dead. We want to assure the public that this threat is contained. Only an elected official would dare to declare a thing safe and finished when he or she didn’t even know yet what it was.

This man was the only one behind the microphones who seemed to think there might be more to this than a malfunctioning aircraft full of dead passengers.

Goodwater?

From the disease control center, the one in Atlanta. Setrakian didn’t know, but he thought his best chance might be with this man. Maybe his only chance.

Four survivors. If they only knew …

He looked out again at the glowing black disk in the sky. Like staring at an eye blinded by a cataract.

Like staring into the future.

Stoneheart Group, Manhattan

THE HELICOPTER touched down on the helipad of the Stoneheart Group’s Manhattan headquarters, a building of black steel and glass in the heart of Wall Street. Its top three floors were occupied by Eldritch Palmer’s private New York residence, a regal penthouse constructed with onyx floors, its tables laden with Brancusis, its walls papered with Bacons.

Palmer sat alone in the media room with the shades all drawn, the glowing black eyeball rimmed in fierce crimson and ringed with flaming white staring out at him from a seventy-two-inch viewing screen. This room, like his home in Dark Harbor and the cabin of his medical helicopter, was kept regulated at exactly sixty-two degrees.

He could have gone outside. It was, after all, cold enough for him; he could have been taken up to the roof to witness the occultation. But technology brought him closer to the event itself—not the resulting shadow, but the image of the sun subordinated to the moon—that was the prelude to the devastation. His Manhattan sojourn would be brief. New York City would not be a very pleasant place to visit, not for much longer.

He placed a few phone calls, a few discreet consultations over his secure line. His cargo had indeed arrived as expected.

Smiling, he rose from his chair, walking slowly but straight at the giant viewing screen, as though it were not a screen at all but a portal he was about to step through. He reached out and touched the LCD screen over the image of the angry black disk, liquid pixels squirming bacteria-like beneath the wrinkled pads of his fingers. As though he were reaching through it to touch the eye of death itself.

This occultation was a celestial perversion, a violation of the natural order. A cold, dead stone deposing a burning, living star. For Eldritch Palmer, it was proof that anything—anything, even the grossest betrayal of natural law—was indeed possible.

Of all the human beings watching the occultation that day, in person or via broadcast around the globe, he was perhaps the only one rooting for the moon.

JFK International Control Tower

THOSE IN THE VIEWING CAB of the air-traffic-control tower 321 feet above the ground glimpsed the eerie sunsetlike twilight way off to the west, out beyond the reach of the great moon shadow, past the edge of the umbra. The brighter penumbra, illuminated by the sun’s blazing photosphere, had turned the distant sky yellow and orange, not unlike the healing edge of a wound.

This wall of light was advancing on New York City, which had now been dark for exactly four minutes and thirty seconds.

“Glasses on!” came the order, and Jim Kent put his on, anxious for sunlight’s return. He glanced around, looking for Eph—everyone from the press conference, including the governor and the mayor, had been invited up into the tower cab for the viewing—and, not seeing him, assumed that Eph had slipped back to the maintenance hangar.

In fact, Eph had used this enforced time-out in the best way he knew: by grabbing a chair as soon as the sun had disappeared and going through a packet of construction diagrams showing cutaway views and schematics of the Boeing 777, ignoring the occultation altogether.

The End of Totality

THE END WAS MARKED by an extraordinary phenomenon. Dazzling prominences of light appeared along the western edge of the moon, combining to form a single bead of dazzling sunlight, like a rip in the darkness, giving the effect of a blindingly radiant diamond set upon the moon’s silver ring. But the price for such beauty, despite a vigorous public service campaign dedicated to eye safety during the occultation, was that more than 270 people across the city, 93 of them children, suffered permanent blindness by watching the sun’s dramatic reappearance without wearing proper eye protection. There are no pain sensors in the retina, and the afflicted did not realize they were damaging their eyes until it was too late.

The diamond ring expanded slowly, becoming a band of jewels known as “Baily’s beads,” which merged into the reborn crescent of the sun, essentially pushing the interloping moon away.

On earth, the shadow bands returned, shimmering over the ground like inaugural spirits heralding the passing from one form of existence to another.

As natural light began filling back in, the human relief on the ground was epic. Cheers and hugs and spontaneous applause. Automobile horns sounded all across the city, and Kate Smith’s recorded voice sang over the loudspeakers at Yankee Stadium.

Ninety minutes later, the moon had completely departed from the path of the sun, and the occultation was over. In one very real sense, nothing at all had happened: nothing in the sky had been altered or otherwise affected, nothing had changed on earth except for the few minutes of late-afternoon shade across the northeastern United States. Even in New York itself, people packed up afterward as though the fireworks show was over, and those who had traveled away from home transferred the focus of their dread from the occluded afternoon sun to the traffic awaiting them. A compelling astronomic phenomenon had cast a shadow of awe and anxiety across all five boroughs. But this was New York, and when it was over—it was over.

AWAKENING

Regis Air Maintenance Hangar

Eph returned to the hangar by electric cart, leaving Jim behind with Director Barnes, giving Eph and Nora some breathing room.

The hospital screens had all been wheeled away from beneath the 777’s wing, the tarp pulled up. Ladders were now hung from the fore and aft exit doors, and a gang of NTSB officials was working near the aft cargo hatch. The aircraft was being regarded as a crime scene now. Eph found Nora wearing a Tyvek jumper and latex gloves, her hair pulled up under a paper cap. She was dressed not for biological containment but for simple evidence preservation.

“That was pretty amazing, huh?” she said, greeting him.

“Yeah,” said Eph, his sheaf of airplane schematics under his arm. “Once in a lifetime.”

There was coffee set out on a table, but Eph instead plucked a chilling milk carton from its bowl of ice, tore it open, and emptied it down his throat. Ever since giving up liquor, Eph, like a calcium-hungry toddler, craved whole milk.

Nora said, “Still nothing here. The NTSB is pulling out the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. I’m not sure why they think the black boxes will work when everything else on the airplane failed catastrophically, but I guess I admire their optimism. So far, technology has gotten us exactly nowhere. We’re twenty hours in now, and this thing is still wide open.”

Nora was perhaps the only person he had ever known who worked better and smarter through emotion rather than the other way around. “Anyone been through the inside of the plane since the bodies came out?”

“I don’t think so. Not yet.”

Eph carried his schematics up the wheeled stairs and into the aircraft. The seats were all empty now, and the lighting inside was normal. The only other difference from Eph’s and Nora’s perspective was that they were no longer sealed inside contact suits. All five senses were available to them now.

Eph said, “You smell that?”

Nora did. “What is it?”

“Ammonia. That’s part of it.”

“And … phosphorous?” The odor made her wince. “Is this what knocked them out?”

“No. The plane is clean for gas. But …” He was looking around—looking around for something they could not see. “Nora, go get the Luma wands, would you?”

While she went back out for them, Eph went throughout the cabin closing the window shades, as they had been the night before, darkening the cabin.

Nora returned with two Luma light wands that emitted a black light, similar to the one used on amusement park rides, that made laundered white cotton glow spectrally. Eph remembered Zack’s ninth birthday party at a “cosmic” bowling alley, and how every time Zack smiled, the boy’s teeth shone bright white.

They switched on the lights, and immediately the dark cabin was transformed into a crazy swirl of colors, a massive staining all throughout the floor and over the seats, leaving dark outlines of where the passengers had been.

Nora said, “Oh my God …”

Some of the glowing substance even coated the ceiling in a splashed-out pattern.

“It’s not blood,” said Eph, overwhelmed by the sight. Looking through to the aft cabin was like staring into a Jackson Pollock painting. “It’s some sort of biological matter.”

“Whatever it is, it’s sprayed all over the place. Like something exploded. But from where?”

“From here. From right where we are standing.” He knelt down, examining the carpet, the smell more pungent there. “We need to sample this and test it.”

“You think?” said Nora.

He stood again, still amazed. “Look at this.” He showed her a page of the airplane schematics. It diagrammed emergency rescue access for the Boeing 777 series. “See this shaded module at the front of the plane?”

She did. “It looks like a flight of stairs.”

“Right in back of the cockpit.”

“What’s ‘OFCRA’ stand for?”

Eph walked down to the galley before the cockpit door. Those very initials were printed on a wall panel there.

“Overhead flight crew rest area,” said Eph. “Standard on these long-distance big birds.”

Nora looked at him. “Did anybody check up here?”

Eph said, “I know we didn’t.”

He reached down and turned a handle recessed in the wall, pulling open the panel. A trifolding door revealed narrow, curving steps leading up into the dark.

“Oh, shit,” said Nora.

Eph played his Luma lamp up the stairs. “I take it that means you want me to go first.”

“Wait. Let’s get somebody else.”

“No. They won’t know what to look for.”

“Do we?”

Eph ignored that, and climbed the tight, curling stairs.

The upper compartment was tight, low-ceilinged. There were no windows. The Luma lights were better suited for forensic examination than indoor illumination.

Inside the first module, they made out two side-by-side business-class-size seats folded down. Behind these were two inclined bunks, also side by side, not much larger than a crawl space. The dark light showed both modules to be empty.

It also, however, showed more of the same multicolored mess they had discovered below. On the floor and tracked over the seats and one of the bunks. But here it was smudged, almost as though tracked in while still wet.

Nora said, “What the hell?”

The ammonia smell was here as well—and something else. A pungent odor.

Nora noticed it too, bringing the back of her hand beneath her nostrils. “What is it?”

Eph stood almost doubled over under the low ceiling between the two chairs. He was trying to put a word to it. “Like earthworms,” he said. “Used to dig them up as kids. Cut them in half in order to watch each section wriggle away. Their smell was earth, the cold soil they crawled through.”

Eph ran his black light over the walls and floors, scouring the chamber. He was about to give up when he noticed something behind Nora’s paper booties.

“Nora, don’t move,” said Eph.

He leaned to one side for a better angle on the carpeted floor behind her, Nora frozen as though she were about to trip a land mine.

A small clump of soil lay on the patterned carpet. No more than a few grams of dirt, a trace amount, richly black.

Nora said, “Is that what I think it is?”

Eph said, “The cabinet.”

They climbed back down the outside stairs to the area of the hangar reserved for cargo, where food-service carts were now being opened and inspected. Eph and Nora scanned the piles of luggage, the golf bags, the kayak.

The black wooden cabinet was gone. The space it had previously occupied, on the edge of the tarpaulin, was bare.

“Someone must have moved it,” said Eph, still looking. He walked away a few steps, scanning the rest of the hangar. “Couldn’t have gotten far.”

Nora’s eyes were blazing. “They are just starting to go through all this stuff. Nothing’s been taken out yet.”

Eph said, “This one thing was.”

“This is a secure site, Eph. That thing was what, about eight by four by three? It weighed a few hundred pounds. Would have taken four men to carry it.”

“Exactly. So somebody knows where it is.”

They went to the duty officer manning the hangar door, the keeper of the site log. The young man consulted his master list, a time log of everyone’s and everything’s entrances and exits. “Nothing here,” he said.

Eph sensed Nora’s objection rising and spoke before she could. “How long have you been here—standing right here?”

“Since about twelve, sir.”

“No break?” said Eph. “What about during the eclipse?”

“I stood right out here.” He pointed to a spot a few yards away from the door. “No one went by me.”

Eph looked back at Nora.

Nora said, “What in the hell is going on?” She looked at the duty officer. “Who else might have seen a great big coffin?”

Eph frowned at the word “coffin.” He looked back into the hangar, and then up at the security cameras in the rafters.

He pointed. “They did.”

Eph, Nora, and the Port Authority site log duty officer walked up the long, steel staircase to the control office overlooking the maintenance hangar. Below, mechanics were removing the aircraft’s nose for a look at the internals.

Four drone cameras ran constantly inside the hangar: one at the door leading to the office stairs; one trained on the hangar doors; one up in the rafters—the one Eph had pointed to—and one in the room they were standing in now. All displayed on a four-square screen.

Eph asked the maintenance foreman, “Why the camera in this room?”

The foreman shrugged. “Prolly ’cause this is where the petty cash is.”

He took his seat, a battered office chair whose armrests were striped with duct tape, and worked the keyboard beneath the monitor, expanding the rafter view to full screen. He scanned back through the security recording. The unit was digital, but a few years old, and too distorted to make out anything clearly during the rewind.

He stopped it. On the screen, the cabinet lay exactly where it had, on the edge of the off-loaded cargo.

“There it is,” said Eph.

The duty officer nodded. “Okay. So let’s see where it went.”

The foreman punched it forward. It ran more slowly than the rewind, but was still pretty fast. The light in the hangar darkened with the occultation, and when it brightened again, the cabinet was gone.

“Stop, stop,” said Eph. “Back it up.”

The foreman backed up a little, pressed play again. The time code on the bottom showed the image playing more slowly than before.

The hangar dimmed and at once the cabinet was again gone.

“What the—?” said the foreman, hitting pause.

Eph said, “Go back just a bit.”

The foreman did, then let it play through in real time.

The hangar dimmed, still lit by the interior work lights. The cabinet was there. And then it vanished.

“Wow,” said the duty officer.

The foreman paused the video. He was confounded too.

Eph said, “There is a gap. A cut.”

The foreman said, “No cut. You saw the time code.”

“Go back a bit then. A bit more … right there … now again.”

The foreman played it again.

And again the cabinet disappeared.

“Houdini,” grumbled the foreman.

Eph looked at Nora.

“It didn’t just disappear,” said the duty officer. He pointed out the other luggage nearby. “Everything else stays the same. Not a flicker.”

Eph said, “Back it up again. Please.”

The foreman ran it yet again. The cabinet disappeared yet again.

“Wait,” said Eph. He’d seen something. “Step it back—slowly.”

The foreman did, and ran it again.

“There,” said Eph.

“Christ,” exclaimed the foreman, almost jumping out of his creaky seat. “I saw it.”

“Saw what?” said Nora, together with the duty officer.

The foreman was into it now, rewinding the image just a few steps.

“Coming …,” said Eph, readying him. “Coming …” The foreman held his hand over the keyboard like a game show contestant waiting to press a buzzer. “… there.”

The cabinet was gone again. Nora leaned close. “What?”

Eph pointed to the side of the monitor. “Right there.”

Just evident on the wide right edge of the image was a black blur.

Eph said, “Something bursting past the camera.”

“Up in the rafters?” said Nora. “What, a bird?”

“Too damn big,” Eph said.

The duty officer, leaning close, said, “It’s a glitch. A shadow.”

“Okay,” Eph said, standing back. “A shadow of what?”

The duty officer straightened. “Can you go frame by frame?”

The foreman tried. The cabinet disappeared from the floor … almost simultaneously with the appearance of the blur in the rafters. “Best I can do on this machine.”

The duty officer studied the screen again. “Coincidence,” he declared. “How could anything move at that speed?”

Eph asked, “Can you zoom in?”

The foreman rolled his eyes. “This here ain’t CSI—it’s Radio-fucking-Shack.”

“So, it’s gone,” Nora said, turning to Eph, the other men unable to help. “But why—and how?”

Eph cupped his hand over the back of his neck. “The soil from the cabinet … it must be the same as the soil we just found. Which means …”

Nora said, “Are we formulating a theory that someone got up into the overhead flight crew rest area from the cargo hold?”

Eph recalled the feeling he had gotten, standing in the cockpit with the dead pilots—just before discovering that Redfern was still alive. That of a presence. Something nearby.

He moved Nora away from the other two. “And tracked some of that … whatever swirl of biological matter in the passenger cabin.”

Nora looked back to the image of the black blur in the rafters.

Eph said, “I think someone was hiding up in that compartment when we first entered the plane.”

“Okay …,” she said, grappling with that. “But then—where is it now?”

Eph said, “Wherever that cabinet is.”