Morrison's four agents wore tactical gear and moved with the economy of people who had been in difficult buildings before. Morrison herself wore her press-conference face — which was also, Kevin had learned, her everything-else face — and the evidence case she'd brought to the church that morning.
The third time Kevin's group went back into the conference center, the FBI came with them.
Morrison had brought four agents in tactical gear and a Bureau-issued digital camera and the institutional caution of an organization that moved at one-eighth the speed of a crisis but moved with considerable authority when it finally moved. She'd also brought a medical examiner's rep, who stood outside the building looking at the structure with the expression of a person who understood, professionally, what three weeks of a closed building with seventy-three infected occupants might mean for anyone attempting to catalog the interior.
"Your team goes in first," Morrison told Kevin. "You know the building. We follow." A pause. "If you encounter the infected, we handle it through the Bureau's protocols."
"The Bureau's protocols for infected?"
"We're developing them." She said it without irony, which was either honesty or advanced bureaucratic performance art.
Karen had done the reconnaissance the night before through the camera feeds, and the executive floor plan had come back from Marcus with a caveat: the executive floor cameras had been offline since Day 8. Something — the infected, a power disruption, one of the board's surviving occupants — had taken out the cameras. The executive floor was a blind spot. Kevin's group would be entering without surveillance support.
"Harrison Vance," Kevin said. "If he's alive, he's been in the executive section for twenty-two days. He had access to the building's emergency supplies — the executive pantry, the separate water filtration, the private bathroom. The executive section is self-contained. It was designed to be." He looked at Karen. "You knew about the executive section's self-containment?"
"The emergency infrastructure was listed in the building security review I processed in year two. Emergency water filtration, seven-day food supply for twelve people, independent HVAC, secure door with keypad access." She adjusted the axe. "If he stayed calm and used the resources efficiently, he's alive."
"And if he didn't stay calm?"
"Then the executive section has a different kind of occupant."
The executive section's secure door was on the fourteenth floor's west end — the opposite end from accounting. To get there, Kevin's group and the FBI team would need to clear the same route they'd used the night before: parking structure, service corridor, stairwell.
The stairwell had changed overnight.
"Two new infected on the ninth-floor landing," Marcus reported from the church, monitoring the cameras. "They moved in from the ninth-floor conference rooms sometime between midnight and seven AM. The seventh-floor one is still there."
"So the stairwell has three now," Kevin said.
"Three confirmed. The ninth-floor two are together — that pack behavior Carl was describing."
Carl, who was not going in this time — who was staying at the church with Paul and the dogs and Bradley, because that had been Kevin's call and it had not been Kevin's decision to explain why he was willing to accept this particular level of risk for Karen and Rachel but not for Carl, which was probably a morally inconsistent position and which he'd resolved by not examining it too closely — Carl had observed that the pack formation in the stairwell meant the ninth-floor infected were extending their territorial assertion upward from the ninth floor.
"They're claiming the stairwell as boundary territory," Carl had said. "The stairwell is the vertical highway. If they're occupying it in a pack configuration, they're trying to secure the whole route."
"How do we get through them without triggering an attack response?"
"You don't go through them. You go around."
The building had a second stairwell. On the east side. Not in Karen's standard route because the east stairwell deposited you at the east end of each floor, which was the long way around from accounting. But the east stairwell was where the infected had not yet extended their territorial reach.
The east stairwell was where Kevin's group and the FBI team entered.
It took them sixteen minutes to reach the fourteenth floor, moving one floor at a time with Marcus reporting on any camera-visible infected near the stairwell's landing doors. The FBI agents were competent. Kevin acknowledged this. They moved quietly, they followed Karen's hand signals without needing explanation, and the one agent who made a sound — his knee popped on the eleventh-floor landing, a sound that seemed enormous in the stairwell's silence — froze and looked at Morrison with the expression of a man anticipating consequences.
Morrison gave him a look that communicated the Bureau's position on joint sounds during a tactical approach without using any words.
Nothing on the eleventh floor responded to the knee.
The fourteenth floor. West end corridor.
The secure door to the executive section had a keypad and a manual backup lock and was closed. The keypad had a green indicator light, which meant the door's battery power was still functional, which meant that the door was either locked from inside or had been left in the secured position when the executive section was sealed.
Karen looked at the door. At the keypad. "The emergency code is four digits. Building standard."
"You know it?"
"I processed the security review that listed it. Subsection seven, paragraph two. The emergency access code for the executive section's sealed door was 2412."
"And if the code has been changed from inside?"
"Then we knock."
They knocked.
Silence. Long silence.
Then a voice, through the door, muffled. The voice of a man who'd been alone or nearly alone for twenty-two days and whose voice had the specific texture of disuse — a little rough, a little uncertain of its own volume. "Who's there?"
Kevin leaned toward the door. "Kevin Park. Software development, third floor. We worked in the same building for three years and you don't know my name."
A longer silence.
"Park," the voice said. "Software development."
"Yes."
"You're alive."
"I'm alive. Are you?"
A long pause. "Yes. Mostly."
"Good. We need to come in. We have federal agents and evidence and a time problem."
A pause. A click. The door opened.
---
Harrison Vance looked like a man who'd had a good tailor and the wrong month.
He was in his early sixties, gray, and had been wearing a suit when everything started and had been in the same suit for twenty-two days, which was doing the suit no favors. His tie was gone. He'd grown the beginning of a beard that wasn't committing to being a beard yet. His eyes had the focused, over-alert quality of someone who'd been on constant threat-assessment for three weeks — not the glassy panic of someone who'd lost stability, but the too-sharp attention of someone who'd been maintaining stability through enormous effort.
The executive section was exactly as Karen had described it. Self-contained. Functional. Seven days of emergency food for twelve people, consumed over twenty-two days by one person with careful rationing. Water filtration still running. The independent HVAC providing clean, filtered air.
Three other people were with him. Kevin didn't recognize two of them — board members, from the look of their clothes, similarly worn. The third was a woman Kevin recognized from the BioVance corporate directory: Helena Marsh, the company's general counsel.
Helena Marsh looked at Agent Morrison and said, "I want to speak to a lawyer."
"You are a lawyer," Morrison said.
"An outside lawyer."
"That can be arranged." Morrison's voice had the quality it had at press conferences: measured, precise, offering exactly what she was required to offer and nothing more.
Kevin looked at Vance. Vance was looking at Kevin with the expression of a man who'd had twenty-two days to think about what he'd done and what he'd allowed to happen and what the difference between those two things was, and who hadn't reached a comfortable conclusion.
"Facility Gamma," Kevin said. "We have the documents. We know about Phase One, Two, Three. We know Phase Four exists. We know the scale." He pulled out the folder Karen had retrieved the night before. "We don't have the cipher key for the location encoding."
Vance looked at the documents. He looked at them for a long time.
Then he sat down on one of the executive section's ergonomic chairs — the expensive kind, the kind that had lumbar support and armrests that adjusted — and he put his hands on his knees and he looked at the floor.
"My daughter," he said.
Kevin waited.
"She was in Phase One. The Nevada trial. She was a volunteer — she didn't know what it was. I told her it was a standard immunization protocol for a new flu vaccine." He was still looking at the floor. "She converted in forty-eight hours. The team running the Nevada site contained it. She's in Meridian's medical facility. Has been for eleven months." He paused. "She's alive. Technically. The conversion isn't complete — they've been maintaining her. Managing the pathogen. Telling me they can reverse it if I cooperate." His hands pressed harder on his knees. "I believed them. I kept believing them. Every phase, every deployment — I kept believing them."
Morrison looked at Kevin. Kevin looked at Morrison.
"Is your daughter in Facility Gamma?" Kevin asked.
"No." Vance's voice was flat. "Facility Gamma is in the Willamette Valley. Oregon. Forty miles south of Portland." He looked up. "The cipher key is in my head. I memorized it because I didn't trust Meridian with a written key I couldn't control. If the cipher exists only in my head, I have leverage." A pause. "I don't have leverage anymore."
He stood up. He was taller than he looked in the photographs Kevin had seen from the BioVance website.
"Agent Morrison," he said. "I'll give you everything. The location, the cipher key, the full operational details, the chain of command. All of it." He looked at his hands. "I need one thing in return."
"Mr. Vance, I'm not in a position to—"
"She was a volunteer who didn't know what she volunteered for. My daughter. I made that happen." His voice stayed flat but the flatness took effort, the effort visible in the tension around his jaw. "I need someone to tell me whether she can be helped."
Morrison was quiet for a moment.
"We'll send a medical team to Meridian's facility," she said. "I can't promise outcomes. I can promise assessment."
Vance nodded. The nod of a man who knew the difference between a promise and an assessment and who accepted the distinction because accepting it was the only thing available.
He went to the desk at the back of the executive section — his desk, the desk of the chairman of BioVance, the desk that had a view of Sacramento and a good chair and a locked drawer that he opened with a key he'd been wearing on a chain around his neck since the first day.
He pulled out a notebook. Four pages of cipher key. His handwriting — tight, precise, the handwriting of a man who was careful with things he needed to keep.
He handed it to Morrison.
"Forty miles south of Portland," he said. "The facility will show on satellite as an agricultural operation. The coordinates are on the third page."
Morrison took the notebook. She handed it to one of her agents. She looked at Kevin.
"We need to move on this," she said.
"Yes."
"Now."
"Yes." Kevin looked at the executive section. At the board members who'd been living in this room for twenty-two days while their decisions played out below them on every floor of the building they'd built. At Harrison Vance, standing with the empty hands of a man who'd traded the last thing he had.
"The infected in this building," Kevin said. "The people on the other floors. Former BioVance employees. Seventy-three people." He looked at Morrison. "They need to be part of whatever comes next."
Morrison's expression acknowledged this. "They will be."
Kevin turned to go. He picked up his walking stick from the executive section's polished floor. Outside the secure door, the fourteenth-floor corridor waited, and below it thirteen floors of people who'd worked in this building and who were still in it in the only way available to them.
He went to the door.
"Park," Vance said, behind him.
Kevin stopped.
"What you did yesterday. The deployment." Vance's voice had the particular quality of a man saying something that cost him. "The people I was supposed to be protecting — you protected them instead." He paused. "I don't know what you want me to do with that."
Kevin looked at him. At the chairman of BioVance, in his twenty-two-day suit, with his hands empty and his leverage gone and his daughter in a facility somewhere waiting for an assessment.
"Nothing," Kevin said. "I don't need you to do anything with it."
He went through the door.
The corridor outside was quiet. The fourteenth floor's east end was clear. Somewhere below, in the building's lower floors, the territorial maintenance was ongoing — the patrols, the packs, the slow circuit of the seventh-floor landing. The building was still occupied by the people BioVance had employed and then lost.
Kevin walked toward the stairwell. His knee moved with him.
The wild spread was nine days from Sacramento's northern edge.
He had work to do.
