It is also not yet known who gave the order authorizing the termination of the Lambda team, or why. The radio transmission is being reviewed.

***FURTHER INFORMATION WILL BE POSTED AS IT BECOMES AVAILABLE.***

Aubrey exited the personnel records and returned the computer to the original screen.

“Jack,” she said. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but this isn’t good.”

FIFTY-ONE

AUBREY DROVE THE CAR, HER vision supposedly much better after having rested for a night in the apartment. Jack sat next to her in the front seat, watching the winding road ahead for the ever-present roadblocks. Laura would have preferred that he drive, but every time he did he got twice as many questions from the police—everyone wanted to grill him about his bandaged head.

It was hard for Laura to hide her happiness that they were going to get Dan with them. She’d done what she could to subvert the Green Berets, but that was all over now, and she needed help to hit important targets—she couldn’t do it on her own.

And she was looking forward to getting rid of the two lovebirds up front. Everything scared them; everything made them second-guess her. But once she was back with Dan, they’d come up with a way to get rid of Jack and Aubrey.

Laura had found keys to this sedan in the apartment they’d been hiding in. It was nice to not have a filthy car with busted windows. This one looked like three late-teens should be driving it; it was old enough to not look stolen, and it was intact, with one dent on the front fender.

“Roadblock,” Jack said, sitting up a little in his seat. “A couple miles ahead.”

Laura stowed her smartphone in the seat pocket. She’d stolen it from a neighboring apartment and had been messing with it all day. She’d been watching the news, tracking the other terrorist groups.

“Old Faithful is a pile of rubble,” she said, sitting a little straighter for the police.

“Weird thing to blow up,” Jack responded, staring ahead at the upcoming barricades.

“Not really. If the point is to scare people, then destroy the things they love. What’s more American than Old Faithful? You can’t even call it that anymore—they said it’s just a mound of rocks that kind of bubbles like a little fountain.”

“I never got to go,” Aubrey said.

“Me either,” said Laura. Not that she’d ever wanted to.

Aubrey turned to glance at Laura. “Did they say anything about Chicago? That was something that I heard in the hotel—that Chicago was bad.”

“Oh yeah,” Laura said, her voice a little quieter now. She’d been paying special attention to that. “A couple days ago—well, maybe about a week ago. It was like everyone—all the terrorists, I mean—converged on Chicago at the same time. The internet is spotty about reports, but most agree it was pretty well devastated.”

She paused, thinking of the implications.

“Devastated more than Seattle?” Aubrey said. “That place was a no-man’s-land.”

“Yeah,” Laura said. “More than that. Listen, I have friends there—I had friends there. I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

That should keep them quiet.

Jack glanced at Aubrey, who just nodded and said, “Okay.”

The roadblock was set up like most of the others, with three police cars blocking the road in a sort of Z pattern. Road flares were burned down to ashes, unnecessary in the daylight. The police car read “California Highway Patrol.”

Aubrey pulled to a stop and put the car in park, and after unrolling her window, she put her hands on the steering wheel. She’d learned from hundreds of miles of experience what the policemen liked to see.

“Where are you headin’?” he asked. He was an older man with a paunch and a gray mustache.

“San Francisco,” Aubrey answered.

“License?”

She held out her wrist bracelet. “I don’t have my real license—it got lost when I went through quarantine. But this is me. We all have them.”

Laura leaned forward and held up her wrist and the tamper-proof ID tag that declared her to be negative for the Erebus virus. The army couldn’t have given her a better present.

“What’s in San Francisco?” he asked, jotting down the identification number off Aubrey’s bracelet. All of the police wrote down the number, but no one had ever checked it, so far as Laura could tell.

“We have family there,” Aubrey said. She sniffled and wiped her eye. For being a goody-goody, Aubrey knew how to lie. “At least we did have family. We haven’t heard from them since the Golden Gate came down.”

“I don’t know if I’d head into the city right now,” the officer said. “It’s getting pretty bad in there, and I’m not talking about the terrorists. I’m talking about what happens when people don’t have any law and order and they all go crazy. To tell the truth, that’s where we should be, but the governor has us here watching the damned border.”

“We’ll be careful.”

He leaned down on the car window and pointed to Jack. “You take care of these ladies.”

“I will, sir.”

“What the hell happened to your head?”

“We were in Seattle when the Space Needle came down,” Aubrey answered for him.

“You’d never believe it,” Jack added. “We were half a mile away, in an apartment, and a piece of steel as big as a tree trunk came flying through the wall.”

“Oh, I believe it,” the officer said, and stood up. “You ask me, this is the start of World War Three. We just haven’t figured out who the damned enemy is yet.”

“I think you may be right,” Aubrey said.

“Well, you’d better get moving. With all these roadblocks you’ve probably got another six, seven hours before you hit the Bay. Good luck to you.”

“Thanks.”

She rolled up the window and shifted the car back into drive.

“One of these times,” Jack said, “someone’s going to check out our story.”

The beginning of World War III. Laura covered her mouth to hide her grin.

FIFTY-TWO

THEY DROVE THROUGH THE DAY, and when it got dark Jack took over—Aubrey’s eyesight just wasn’t good enough at night.

Not much was open anymore, but they found a McDonald’s outside of Vacaville. There was an armed security guard—not a cop, but a scary-looking mammoth of a man who had a Taser on one hip and a gun on the other. After everything she’d seen, Aubrey thought it was laughable that anyone thought this guy could stop a terrorist Lambda. But, at least the McDonald’s was open—the three of them were starving.

Aubrey ordered the food while the other two—both still injured and looking terrible—sat in a booth toward the back. Aubrey had noticed that there was a spot of blood showing though Laura’s shirt, but Laura refused to acknowledge it. It was like she was a machine—single-minded in whatever it was that she was trying to do. Aubrey just didn’t know what that was.

Aubrey didn’t have any great ideas for what they ought to be doing, but she didn’t know why Laura’s plan was any better than anything else. Why were they looking for Laura’s friends instead of Aubrey and Jack’s? They could track down Matt Ganza. He had to be somewhere. Or Nicole. She was with the State Department now, and if anyone could get them out of this mess, Nicole seemed like a good choice.