The Hatching Page 4

  Up in the plane, she’d wanted Manny with an urgency that had long been missing from their relationship. As much as she wanted to stay in the air, flying circuits over the image of the spider, she also couldn’t wait to be on the ground again, in the privacy of their tent, doing what she hoped would finally lead to the baby she thought might save their marriage.

  She’d been wrong about both the baby and saving the marriage.

  After she and Manny divorced, she still remembered the trip fondly. While they circled in the air she’d hastily drawn her own rendition of the Nazca spider:

  After the divorce was finalized, she’d torn the page from her notebook, trimmed it neatly, and framed it. It was on the wall near her desk at the lab. It didn’t take her breath away as the actual lines carved into the earth had. There was something about the scale, the permanence, the way the lack of rain and wind had left the lines undisturbed for more than two thousand years that both rattled her and filled her with happiness. She liked thinking there might have been a woman like her, hoping desperately for a baby, pulling rocks from the ground nearly twenty-five hundred years ago.

  Or longer.

  “Ten thousand years,” Julie said. “Not twenty-five hundred.”

  Melanie pulled at the collar of her shirt, but she wasn’t really thinking about the heat anymore. She recognized the first stirrings of intellectual engagement, the way that she could become consumed with curiosity. The fact that it was the Nazca Lines made it easier for her to get engaged, but the truth was that it had never been difficult to pique her interest. She’d gotten better about remembering to do things like eat meals, shower, and change her clothes—having a private bathroom in her office helped—but at heart, she was still the same research geek who was happiest in her lab trying to find the answer to a question. “Who?” she said. “Who’s telling you that the lines were made ten thousand years ago?”

  “Not all of them,” Julie said. “Uh, and it’s a friend of mine, a guy I went to undergrad with.” Normally there’d be a little part of Melanie that would be interested in the gossip, would pry until Julie admitted he was somebody she’d slept with when she was nineteen or twenty, a guy she still carried a torch for, but she was starting to get impatient with these three graduate students. “He’s a grad student too, and he’s working on the site. Archaeology.”

  “Of course.”

  “Right,” Julie said, “so we e-mail back and forth kind of regularly, and I mentioned your theory to him.”

  Melanie started walking again. This was getting tiresome. “What theory?”

  “About the spider,” Bark said. He started to say something else, but Julie cut him off.

  “One of the things they’re trying to figure out with the dig is if the lines were made in a compressed period of time all together—over years or a few decades—or spread out over a few hundred years. How long did they take to make? They’ve been able to find wooden stakes near most of the lines that they think might have been used almost like surveyor’s stakes by the Nazca when they were doing the designs. But he was working on the spider site and, sure enough, he found stakes. They had one dated.”

  “And?”

  “The spider isn’t a Nazca Line.”

  Melanie realized she was walking more quickly than was comfortable, but the café was in sight, and the thought of the temporary respite from the heat helped her to keep up the pace. “It sure looks like a Nazca Line,” she said.

  “No,” Julie said. “The Nazca Lines look like the spider. All the other lines are about twenty-five hundred years old, as you said, but the spider’s older. A lot older. It’s ten thousand years old, give or take a little. It was there well before the other lines.”

  Melanie slowed down as she reached the café steps. “So what does that have to do with us?” She glanced over her shoulder and realized that all three students had stopped walking. Patrick, Bark, and Julie were standing on the ground, three steps below her, looking up expectantly. “Well?”

  Julie glanced at the two young men and they nodded at her. “It wasn’t just the stakes,” Julie said. “When he was doing the dig, he found something underneath the stakes, buried in a wooden box. He had some of that wood dated, and it’s the same age as the stakes. Ten thousand years. You’ll never guess what was in the box.”

  Julie paused, and Melanie found herself getting frustrated. Pausing for dramatic effect, she thought, was overrated, and in the case of a gaggle of graduate students, annoying. But despite herself, she was fully curious and couldn’t stop from blurting out, “What?”

  “An egg sac. At first, none of them realized what it was, but when he did, he suggested to his faculty advisor that they send it to our lab to see if we could identify it. They thought it was fossilized or petrified, or whatever it is you call it when something like that is preserved. Since the wooden box is ten thousand years old, and the egg sac was inside the box, the sac is probably at least that old too.”

  “Huh,” Melanie said. “Okay. Tell them to send it to us so we can take a look at it.”

  “He already sent it. It’s back in the lab. I, uh, I told him they could use our FedEx shipping code, so he overnighted it,” Julie said. The words came out of her mouth as though she expected Melanie to yell at her.

  Melanie stifled her annoyance. Budgets had been tight, but not so tight that Julie couldn’t charge the shipping costs of a package if it was actually lab business. Though, Melanie wondered, how much did it actually cost to overnight something from Peru?

  “There’s more,” Bark said. He was standing straight and staring at her with an intensity he usually reserved for when they were alone.

  “More?” Melanie glanced at Patrick and Julie and then back at Bark. All three looked nervous and excited, clearly unsure if what they had come to get her for was as big a deal as they thought it was. “Well,” she said, hearing that her voice was sharper than she meant it to be. “Out with it.”

  Bark looked at his colleagues, then back at Melanie. “The egg sac,” he said. “It’s hatching.”

  The White House

  “Nuke ’em,” the president said. “Just launch the nukes and be done with it.” She leaned back in her chair and looked at the young man hovering by her side. One of the new interns. Manny smiled. He couldn’t remember the intern’s name, but President Stephanie Pilgrim liked them young and handsome. Arm candy, of sorts. She was never inappropriate with them—thankfully, that wasn’t one of Manny’s many worries as White House chief of staff—but she definitely liked having them around. The president reached out and put her hand on the intern’s forearm. “How about you go get us a big bowl of popcorn or something, maybe some chips and salsa. All this talk of war is making me feel a bit peckish.”

  “Come on, Steph,” Manny said. “You’re not taking this seriously.”

  “I’m the president of the United States of America, Manny, and you will address me appropriately,” she said, smiling. “President Steph to you. And how am I supposed to take this seriously? It’s an exercise. The other team is out there in the heat of the primaries. Pretty soon they’re going to figure out which one of those clowns is getting the nomination, and they’ll start aiming at me instead of each other. In the meantime, we’re holed up in the Situation Room pretending that we’re actually going to go to war with China. Can’t I just order the nukes and call it a day? I’ve got more important shit to do than play war games to satisfy the army’s hard-on.”

  “Technically, this one’s primarily a naval situation,” Manny said.

  “How long have you known me, Manny?”

  Manny didn’t say anything. He’d known Stephanie Pilgrim long enough to know she didn’t want an answer. Known her back when they were young and dumb and undergraduates. He was a freshman and she was a senior, and she went by Steph, not Madam President, and she liked to torture him in certain inappropriate moments by telling him she wasn’t wearing panties under her skirt. Not that she was particularly promiscuous. Even then she
was careful about watching her reputation. She was already planning to be in the spotlight. But they had clicked immediately, and she had not only been attracted to him, she had trusted him. They hadn’t exactly dated, but before Manny met and married Melanie, he and Steph had had a sort of understanding that went beyond their professional working relationship. They’d come to that understanding again since things had imploded with him and Melanie. Well, not imploded. Dissolved was a better word. But finding himself free and uninterested in dating, and with Steph having to be careful about maintaining the illusion that she was in a happy marriage, it had been easy to fall back into their old pattern of occasionally sleeping together. For him, there’d been a bit of guilt. The guilt wasn’t about Steph. They were attracted to each other, reasonably decent in bed, and loved each other, even if they weren’t in love with each other. They respected each other and liked each other and didn’t have any secrets from each other. Neither of them was going to end up hurt. No, Manny felt bad about George. He genuinely liked Steph’s husband. Dr. George Hitchens was a nice guy. He was certainly an asset when it came to electability. Handsome and well-spoken, content to let Steph do her thing in the political arena, content to be a politician’s husband. He was blue blood, old money from Texas, smart enough to go to an Ivy League university and to graduate from medical school without having to pull any strings, or at the very least, without having to pull them hard enough that they unraveled in embarrassing ways. He’d practiced as a dermatologist right up until Steph won the big one. Since they’d gotten to the White House he’d jumped feetfirst into being “the First Hubby,” as the press liked to call him. He could cut a ribbon with the best of them. He was as close to a dream husband as a female politician could have.

  That was the problem, though. Stephanie loved George, but only in the way that you love somebody who is decent and good and whom you’ve known for fifteen years. She loved him, but wasn’t in love with him. Never had been. The politician had married him, not the woman. Probably if she’d gone for a different kind of career, done something other than pursue law school as the shortest route to politics and then the presidency, she would have already divorced George. But that wasn’t an option now.

  Manny was not a modest man when it came to his talents: he was a straight-out fucking genius in the political sphere. And although Stephanie Pilgrim was a machine—effortlessly attractive and likable, smart and witty, good background, better luck, fierce and determined—even Manny knew there were limits. Nobody had given her a serious chance when she declared, but Manny had hit it out of the park, and here he was the White House chief of staff. If they wanted to stay in power, however, Stephanie was going to have to do what she’d gotten good at, and that was walking the razor’s edge between being female and being president of the United States. The country might have been ready for a woman president, might have been ready for that woman president to be forty-two and the youngest commander in chief ever elected, beating Teddy Roosevelt by a measly four days, might even be ready to reelect that same woman after three solid years of economic growth and peace, but they sure as hell weren’t ready to reelect a woman in the middle of a divorce.

  Stephanie rolled her chair back from the table and rubbed her eyes. “You know as well as I do that these things are just a bullshit waste of time. Let the military run their exercises and war games, let them have their simulations, and the next time something happens we’ll do what we always do, which is assess the situation—one that is certain to be different from this imagined clusterfuck with China—and deal with it. The only reason we’re doing this, as far as I can tell, is for the military to figure out if I have the balls to order an attack. So let’s give it to them. Let me just order a nuke. Bomb the whole fucking country. We’ll call it a day and get some real work done. Besides,” she said, “this is scheduled for what, three hours? We end now and we’ll have an extra two hours in the day.”

  She didn’t say it, couldn’t say it in the room full of suits and uniformed people, but Manny knew she was hinting that they could take half an hour of that extra time to themselves. He remembered the way it was in college. She was three years older than he was, and he’d still been a virgin when they met. At eighteen, he’d always been more than content to spend an entire afternoon lounging in bed with her. Now, in his early forties, he’d still be content to spend the afternoon lounging in bed with her, but that wasn’t going to happen. The most important commodity the president of the United States had now was time.

  “Madam President, if I may.” It was Ben Broussard, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ben was the one man in the room guaranteed to rub Stephanie the wrong way. Manny tried to stop himself from cringing at the sound of Ben’s voice, but it was hard. Things had been going downhill with Ben since the second he was appointed, and sooner or later—sooner was better—Ben was going to find himself neatly retired. “I know it can seem like we are wasting time with these regular exercises, but it’s important to run through plausible situations so that we can react quickly when there is an event that does call for military response.”

  Stephanie glanced up at Manny, and he knew she’d already said as much as she was going to say about the matter. It was his time to speak. That was one of the reasons they worked so well together. As much as it was bullshit, they both knew the truth, which was that a woman, even if she was the president of the United States of America, was judged differently. Perception was reality, and she couldn’t be perceived as a complainer. Of course, Manny didn’t have the same worries.

  “Come on, Ben,” Manny said. “This simulation does seem a little outdated. Might it not make a little more sense to be running this in response to a mock terrorist attack, or a conflagration in a place that is more of a hot zone? Obviously there have been some serious tensions with China, but we all know we aren’t even close to exchanging shots with them. Not like we are with a country like—”

  “Somalia.” The secretary of defense, Billy Cannon, never had a problem with interrupting Manny. Usually because he was right. “We should be running exercises with Somalia, because we’re going to have to do the real thing there soon enough. The chances of us actually engaging in open warfare with China seem remote at best. It’s about as useful as running a simulation of a zombie attack.”

  The intern returned with a tray and put it down on the sideboard behind the president. He’d brought both a bowl of popcorn and bowls of tortilla chips and salsa, and he took them off the tray to place them on the table in front of the president. Manny watched how discreet the young man was, the way he waited until all the attention was focused on Billy before sliding the snacks in front of the president, the fact that he remembered that Steph liked her soda in a can, despite the White House staff’s determination to serve it to her in cut crystal. There was a particular skill in that, Manny thought, in knowing how to keep the people around you happy while still blending into the background. The intern’s name was Tim or Thomas or something like that, and Manny made a note to himself to see about keeping the kid on after his internship was over.

  Manny put a hand on Steph’s shoulder, a familiarity he was afforded by both his position and the length of their relationship, and leaned over her to snag a handful of popcorn.

  Billy Cannon and Ben Broussard were at it now, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff still arguing that this China simulation was useful, and Billy not backing down. Manny knew he should cap things, either move them past the exercise and get them out of the room, or go ahead and force Steph to go through the motions, but he enjoyed watching Billy Cannon argue. Billy Cannon came from money, but he looked as though he belonged in uniform. Unlike some of the generals who let themselves go once they’d gotten to the point where they could give orders instead of taking them, Billy was still trim, coiled, handsome, and dangerous-looking, with salt-and-pepper hair and a scar on his temple from hand-to-hand fighting when he was in combat. Billy’s wife had died four or five years ago, of breast cancer, and he�
��d only recently started dating. Manny could understand why the women in DC were dying to be on his arm. There was even talk that People magazine was considering him for the sexiest man thing. Sooner or later, Billy would decide to retire and then he’d run for some sort of office and he’d be a shoo-in.

  “Enjoying the show?” The national security advisor, Alexandra Harris, rose partially off her seat and snagged a few tortilla chips. She didn’t bother with the salsa. Manny liked Alex, and even though they were often at odds on what to do with the information she brought to the president, he thought she’d been one of the best appointments Steph made. Alex was smart, fierce, and loyal, and whatever her opinion was going into a fight, as soon as the president made a decision, she was completely on board. You didn’t get to these heights without an acute sense of political survival and the kind of driving ambition you could see from outer space, but as far as Manny could tell, Alex was exactly where she wanted to be. She never tried to subvert the president. Besides, Alex was seventy-three. Too late for a presidential run of her own. Assuming Steph was reelected, Alex would serve out the first year of Steph’s second term and then retire to the countryside.

  Steph finally spoke up, and there was a bit of an edge to her voice. Manny and Alex might both be amused by watching the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs arguing over whether or not the simulation was even worth doing, but clearly the president was full up.