Quaranteam: Book Two (Ch. 31)

Chapter Thirty-One

May 11 th, 2021

"I don't understand why you're not wearing a tie," Phil said to Andy in a grumbling tone of voice as the two sat in the back of the SUV on opposite sides, Lexi and Melody flanking Andy, Violet and Linda flanking Phil. Fi and Ming were in the car following behind them. "We're going to go see the President of the United States at her request and you look like you're going to take a meeting with the head of Warner Brothers."

"I told the President when I agreed to take this job in the Oversight Committee that I wasn't going to wear a suit and tie for anyone," Andy shot back. "I didn't wear a tie at my own wedding, and I had seven women pestering me about that, not just one."

"She's going to make a crack about you disrespecting her just because she's the first female President. You know that don't you?"

"Then I can make a crack about how she's asking a sci-fi writer for advice in dealing with world affairs and ask if I should consider starting my own religion," Andy chuckled.

"Thanks L. Ron."

"I'm sure I can come up with some bullshit electronic doodad to pretend to sense blerbtron rays that are slowly poisoning the moral turpitude of America," Andy said with a grin. "It would be nice to never pay taxes again. It's insane the shit people will believe if you simply present yourself as confident enough."

"Just don't go claiming you're a god or anything," Melody said to him.

"Oh, I'm never going to declare I'm a god, but if someone asks you if you're a god, you say yes," Andy laughed. "Have we learned nothing from our 'Ghostbusters'?"

"I, for one, know whom I am going to call," Linda jeered.

"You're not nervous about going to the White House?" Phil asked Andy.

"Of course I'm nervous, but if I stop and think about it, I'm only going to make myself more nervous, and what good is that going to do anyone? Besides, we're just doing what's been asked of us, and if we don't tell the President all this shit, who will?"

"Please, God, let it be anyone but us."

"Phil, baby, you helped save the world," Linda said to him. "Maybe a little less with the fear and nervousness?"

"You're not expected to give a presentation that includes words like 'survivability rate' and 'life adjustment,' Linda," Phil sighed, looking down at his hands. Phil had been veering back and forth between manic and depressed nonstop for the last few weeks. "Between the strange variants and the odd side effects, there's so much information to present to them that I'm surprised they didn't schedule us to be here for longer. We're going to have to be succinct and to the point on just about everything, and when she asks us to get into more details, we're still going to have to stick to the highlights and try not to get too in-depth."

"Cover the big stuff, Phil. And if you drop anything, I'll do what I can to pick it up," Andy said.

Looking out the window of the SUV, Andy was surprised to see there was a large crowd outside of the White House, although it seemed to be split into two groups, with a few women in law enforcement tactical gear in the midst, making sure there was a safe space in the middle, although both groups seemed to be shouting at each other furiously. He was sure Fi was taking plenty of photographs in the car behind them - that was why she'd traded places with Melody, so that she could move around a bit more and have more space to take pictures.

On the east side, Andy could see signs with slogans like "Men Have Rights Too!" "My Gun, My Life!" "The MPA Is a Death Sentence!" "A President Nobody Voted For!" "Nobody Owns Me!" "I Will Not Be Locked Up At Home!" "2022 Is Too Long To Wait For Elections!" "My Home Is Not a Prison!" "American Women First!" and, most depressingly, "I Will Die Free Instead of Living In Chains!" There were a few men out there, but for the most part, it was women holding the signs. What broke his heart was seeing a few young children out there, clearly kids no older than nine or ten, too young to truly understand what they were even doing.

On the west side, Andy could see contrasting signs with things like "Keep Our Men Safe!" "Our Country Trumps Your Personal Freedoms!" "The Next Generation Is Counting on Us!" "The Women Are In Charge Now!" "American Women First!" (a sign he was confused to see on both sides) "Our Turn To Legislate Your Bodies!" and, most remarkably, "We're Doing This For Your Own Good!" On that side, however, Andy couldn't see a single man, just lots and lots of angry women.

It was a stark reminder that even though the issues had changed, the country was still heavily divided. He'd been watching the news, and the reporting had been forced to change. Some of the issues that had been hot button issues before the plague were still there, just in new forms.

The entire "American Women First" movement had been a direct reaction to Operation: Funnel Cake, and they were starting to sound less and less like a bunch of pissed off women and more and more like an up-and-coming political movement. Their claims were that American women had been overlooked for better jobs and better pairings in favor of women being imported from overseas. It wasn't entirely inaccurate, but also ignored the point that the women who were protesting didn't have the skills, training or education needed to get the jobs that Funnel Cake was filling in. The AWF movement was, at least, correct that the American system could've been teaching and training upwards instead of replacements, something that was usually argued against with 'we don't have the time.'

Much of the last year had been soul crushing for a variety of reasons. Beyond all the deaths of so many millions of men and children, many women had been wracked by survivor's guilt, a sense that there was no rhyme or reason as to why they survived when their spouses and children hadn't. The number of people who had died by suicide had been terrifyingly on the incline, more women than men, even though the numbers for suicide had traditionally gone the other way. There had definitely been male suicides over the last year, but the reported count for women suicides was truly frightening, and quite sizably larger.

The loss of a lover or a child could tax even the strongest souls, but both was enough to break plenty of spirits.

The religious movement's pressure to try and influence the national debate had gotten wild, as abortion was no longer the number one hotplate issue. That award had fallen on whether religion would be taught in schools again. Schools were expected to reopen in the fall, not just lower-level schools, but universities as well. And colleges had begun making pitches for students of all ages to attend, hoping to lure lapsed twenty-somethings who'd never gone to college, offering highly discounted rates to Train Up America, giving skills to help replace lost workers and reestablish lost systems. Some of the more organized religious groups in America were pushing to make sure that they were getting their beaks wet with that policy as well.

Remote learning was set to be a big part of it, but many of the college dormitories had been revised for Teams rather than individual students, and in the coming months, they would start to figure out if that new system was viable.

For better or worse, America wanted to try and feel normal again, even if only for a moment.

Also scheduled for the fall was the 'Open For Business' movement to kick off, a statement to the rest of the world that America had settled with its Teams and that they thought they could start trying to go back to things being 'the way they were,' except, of course, for the new norms.

According to all the reports, America was now 92% vaccinated against DuoHalo, and before August 1st, they would be at 100% coverage, or at least as close to possible as it was to get. (There were tiny pockets of holdouts insisting they didn't need it, and the government was still debating whether to force these people to take the serum or to simply let them die.) Still, there was the sense among some of the population that the country hadn't healed back quite right.

Maybe it was just the insane number of ghosts looming over them.

Over the last few months, Andy had been able to witness the slow awakening of the American people. He'd been making regular trips to work on projects and help promote the books. On those trips he'd gotten to witness Americans no longer confined to their houses, trying to adapt to their new family units in public, something that in and of itself had been great fun to watch.

Andy's first trip to a shopping mall in over a year just a few short days ago had been wild. He'd expected to find the place a virtual ghost town, but instead, it seemed more packed than he'd remembered it being in years, with the food court filled to the brim with women catching up with each other after having been locked away for so long. Sure, there were the occasional men scattered around, but for the most part, it felt like a female-centric society.

Andy was starting to realize he had to get used to being pointed at and gossiped about in public.

The mall staff hadn't been entirely devoid of men, though. It often felt like a shop, or a series of shops, would have one man staffed somewhere with other members of his Team circled around in nearby stores, so that needs could be handled in back rooms during lunches or breaks. It also felt like the stores were managed by a lot less people than they had been before, but nobody seemed to be thinking about shoplifting or robbing, almost like the mall had turned into a village of its own.

Team Rook hadn't just gone to the mall to pick up new clothes, although several of his partners had certainly used the opportunity for that. They'd also gone to see the first movie released into theaters since the pandemic, "Top Gun: Maverick." The film included a dedication to all the actors and crew who had passed away between when the movie was filmed and when it was released. Andy hadn't been surprised that Tom Cruise hadn't died, but the giant list of 'in memoriam' names at the end of the movie was a bit overwhelming. It had been nice to see a movie in a public movie theater, though, even if he had a movie theater in his own house. The roar and rush of having random strangers around with you, caught up in the moment, that was too precious to overlook, something he hadn't realized he'd missed quite as badly as he did.

Andy's Team had even gone and had dinner at the food court, enjoying some Mongolian BBQ at Khan's, something most of his teammates had never tried before, as they tried to emulate Andy's mixing of meats, veggies, noodles and sauces in the bowl before handing it over to be cooked up. And during that time, several of Andy's wives had struck up conversations with other random women sitting around the food court, being aggressively social in a way that Andy just couldn't comprehend. By the time they'd left an hour later several of his partners had made new friends who they'd made plans to either call or hang out with on another day.

Now, being driven by Secret Service into the White House, seeing the two groups of protestors shouting loudly at one another, Andy wondered if that idyllic moment at the Great Mall had been the outlier, or if this was.

"You're freaking out about the protesters, aren't you, Andy?" Phil teased.

"Knock it off, Phil," Linda said to him. "He's still got that shooting from last year on his mind, and I don't blame him."

"They weren't shooting at him," Lexi scolded.

"Shooting near me is plenty clear enough," Andy said.

"You can't get worried by a little gunfire," Melody said.

"I really can."

The SUV was swept at the first checkpoint, and at the second checkpoint, all the women in the car had to check their guns, as they entered one of the safest buildings on the planet - the White House.

Andy had spent a lot of time when he was writing with The West Wing in the background, as Aaron Sorkin had been one of his personal heroes when it came to writing, but standing in the structure, it felt smaller than it did on television.

Still, it was a stark change to see almost exclusively women staffing all the positions, walking throughout the hallways. There were a couple of men scattered around, but Andy knew this was going to be the new normal moving forward, and he needed to get used to men's faces being less and less common when he was around large groups of people.

He watched Fiona taking pictures of him and Phil before she walked up to them, a smile on his face. "I agree with what Phil said when he first saw us this morning - you look like you're not taking this seriously enough," she said, kissing his cheek. "I know that you are, though. But still - jeans? Shirt with no tie?"

"I don't do ties, Fi," Andy chuckled. "It's not like I'm wearing an 'I'm With Stupid" t-shirt or anything."

"You're not wearing dress shoes."

"Dress shoes look ridiculous with jeans."

"You could've worn slacks."

"Next thing you'll know you'll be asking why I'm not wearing a sport coat."

"I know better," Fiona teased, hugging him tightly for a moment. "Sorry, I'm ruining your moment, aren't I? You've never been here before."

"And you've been here a bunch. Shit, they've probably shown you the emergency bunker."

"I was a reporter, Andy, not Mata Hari. I never jumped out of a cake and sung 'Happy Birthday Mister President' or anything..."

"You say that, Fi..." Andy said as they both laughed.

"I never thought I'd be standing here," Ming said, offering Andy a shy smile, glancing over as an Air Force detail came to get her. "We'll meet back here, I guess, when it's all done?"

"Don't worry, Ming," Fiona said. "I'll come with you."

"Ma'am, I don't think--" a member of the detail started to say before Fi interrupted her.

"Either I go with her, or she doesn't need to talk to you, Lieutenant."

"Yes ma'am. This way, Mrs. Rook, Miss Chen."

"See you soon, dear," Andy said, kissing his wife's cheek.

"Don't wait up," Fi teased as she and Ming headed off into the depths of the White House.

A moment later, Andy felt a tap on his shoulder.

"Dr. Marcos? Mr. Rook? I'm Tabitha Grey, assistant chief of staff for the President," a woman in her early forties said to them. She was a stout woman, but it seemed more and more like women were abandoning a lot of the fashion trends that many of the working women had been chasing for years in favor of leaning in more practical and comfortable directions. She looked like she was maybe of Italian heritage, slightly tanned skin, dark hair in a shoulder length bob, and she looked like she was exhausted, something Andy had always suspected anyone who worked for any length of time in the White House would have about them. "I'm going to bring you down to the situation room, where you're going to meet up with the rest of the Oversight Committee. This way, please?"

The group started to walk before Ms. Grey paused and frowned a little. "I'm sorry, your security details need to remain here."

"That's not happening," Linda said. "We've got clearance for--"

"Ma'am, no offense, but you do not have clearance for this, and your men are in the safest structure in the world," Ms. Grey said. "There are more armed defenses here than almost anywhere else on the planet, and they're all highly trained. I will bring them back to you safe and sound, I promise."

Linda frowned, curling her hand into a fist before uncurling it as she nodded to Ms. Grey. Then she turned to look at Phil. "You get hurt, and I'll fucking kill you, you understand me?"

"Yes, m'love," Phil chuckled.

They walked down the hall and down the stairs heading into the situation room, where Andy saw a couple of familiar faces joined by a couple of new ones. At the head of the table sat President Pelosi, who looked drained. She'd always looked old, but now she was starting to look a little frail and weakened, the last year having clearly taken ten years' worth of toll on her body. To her immediate right sat the only man in the room, Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, General Charles Brown, the man whose quick thinking and rapid deployment had helped the Air Force coordinate the efforts to keep humanity alive. To his right sat Senator Giancola and Representative Engle, both of whom Andy was plenty familiar with. Across the table from them was Caroline Perdomo, the White House Chief of Staff, Representative Angela Marquez (a Democrat from New York) and Senator Ali Miller (a Republican from Texas).

"Well, gentlemen, I understand you've got some news for us," the President said with a soft sigh. "Important enough that it needed to be delivered in person, so here you are. And I understand Doctor Marcos thinks it's a big enough deal, and complicated enough, that we would need several hours to go through this. Well, Doctor, you've got an hour to convince me that what we're going to talk about is going to need the rest of the day."

It didn't even take Phil five minutes.

Between the extended lifespans of larger Teams, the reduced aging, the new variants of both DuoHalo and the Quaranteam serum were springing up, the rogue general's project over at Valhalla Shores, the invasion and surrender of the two Chinese factions and the fact that Phil was fairly certain the nanobots were communicating between Teams, by just giving one sentence summaries on all the things that had sprung up over the last few months, every person at the table was taking frantic notes, trying to keep up with him, only for Phil to be already detailing yet another problem, like women kidnapping other women to bring them into Teams in Europe in order to fight off some kind of rogue strain of Duo Halo. Phil quickly rattled off the recent complications in Africa, and pointed out that within about a year's time, the whole planet would achieve some kind of global stability, with everyone alive and of age either partnered up or likely dead.

"God help us," the President finally said after Phil stopped long enough to draw breath. "Alright, let's start going through these one at a time."

For the next few hours, Phil walked through how much longer people with larger Teams were going to live and what he wanted to do with his. He called it Project: XNW, which was short for Ten (X in roman numerals) New Wonders, a series of internal infrastructure projects the likes of which America had never even contemplated. They ranged from building a high-speed rail system connecting all the major cities in the country to developing large-scale sustainable renewable power sources to a complete rework of urban planning and structuring in the major cities, built around the new Team family unit structure, preferably without the dependence on the personal automobile. The unifying theme of these projects was sustainability, things that would be built to last and aid as many Americans as possible.

At first, the size and scale of the ten projects Phil detailed seemed almost insurmountable, but Phil pointed out that with extended lifespans, these projects could have the same person in charge of them, even if they took decades to accomplish. Phil had taken the fact that he was going to live to be a few hundred years old and started to apply a sense of scale and time to it, and he wanted this generation, perhaps the only generation that was ever going to have such a remarkable chance to execute public works projects on this scale, to take full advantage of it.

In rough form, with so many people needing work, America could build a brighter, better, bigger future, if it was willing to commit to aiming for the sky.

While there were plenty of thoughts on the matter, Phil had certainly built a compelling case, one that Andy suspected the committee was going to be discussing for weeks to come. After all, they were still reeling from the fact that Phil had just told them they were probably going to live twice as long as they'd currently thought they were.

Phil's big concern was that they were cutting corners and building a shitty foundation upon which they were going to build everything else. That would mean they'd be constantly having to waste time on repairing a poorly constructed base. To do it right, it would take longer, but it would also last longer and require significantly less upkeep. As Phil pointed out, they needed to stop worrying about what tomorrow looked like and more about what next year looked like.

"Stop thinking you're going to be dead in a decade or two, and start planning for the next century," Phil said. "You're all probably going to live to see it."

The power grid, the public utilities, the infrastructure including roads and rails - all of it, the entire foundation the country was going to be built upon - Phil's point was that in the triangle of good, fast and cheap, Good needed to be first, and fast needed to be last.

Phil's philosophy was 'do it right or spend the rest of your life redoing it.'

He spent at least an hour convincing the President it needed to be hers too.

After moving away from the giant publics works projects, General Brown wanted to talk about China, and their state in the world, especially following the blossoming revolutions in all the former Russian states. Andy explained that Empty Wives faction had taken over much of the remaining Chinese government and military, and that while some hardliners were still working to protect their power, China overall was extremely eager to get into Project: Funnel Cake and do everything they could to keep their population from flatlining. The previous one-child policy had caused a significant jump in the sex ratio (the statistic that measured male to female ratios) and because they had had so many more men to lose (many if not most of which had already been lost), the country was in a giant state of disarray.

China's female leaders were almost all restricted to local and provincial governance, and so, when the central government had collapsed within a month of catching DuoHalo, the one lone woman of power, Vice Premier Wan Zhangong, had done everything she could to attempt to hold the country together, rallying forces to enforce quarantines and decontamination zones. The remaining CCP forces had attempted to overthrow her, but when that failed, they had made a last-ditch effort to try and kidnap key members of the Quaranteam project, anybody they thought had access to enough of the serum for them to steal and replicate it.

Andy mentioned that Dr. Ming-Yue Chen, his new partner, was with them, but was already continuing her debrief upstairs, and she would be happy to answer any other questions it would take to get the United States to turn up the speed at which Quaranteam serum was flowing into China. The highlights of the China situation had already been known to the President, the Chief of Staff and the General, but to the politicians, all the news had apparently been their first exposure to the information, and many of them were unhappy that they'd been kept in the dark about it.

To keep them from lingering too long on it, Andy then got into a detailed report about the situation at Valhalla Shores, how the general there had developed a variant of the serum that was allowing them to program people's minds. That made everyone in the room increasingly uncomfortable, especially the fact that they had no tracking information or any idea of where they could reel it back in.

Andy could see the General taking notes, and he immediately suspected it was about how to lock down the supply chain for the serum and the pairing process, how to ensure safety from injection to imprinting, how to keep everyone from getting caught up in this mess.

From there, the conversation turned into discussing the details of announcing that the Swerve was available for anyone in the United States who wanted it, with the express knowledge that it could only be used once, and what kind of turnout they would be getting when they did.

That was the point where Andy was more than a little taken aback by the Texan Senator, who had been doing research in her state, trying to determine what percentage of people would take the option of being reassigned was in the single digit percentage points, maybe even as low as 1-2%. Representative Engle said those numbers were in line with her own office's research, as did both Senator Giancola and Representative Marquez. He hadn't expected the numbers to be anywhere near that low.

The Oracle, it seemed, had done its job with flying colors.

After getting past the Oracle and Sergei Swerve discussion, the conversation moved on to focus on the situation in Africa and Europe. There had been some peculiar side effects to Gemivax, the British variant, that the folks over the UK wanted Phil to take a look at, and so he agreed to have a look and see if anything popped out at him. And the situation in Africa had continued to grow more and more complicated, with countries starting to get into scraps and squabbles, and it was starting to turn into regular firefights, shootouts between armed troops of women over land, resources... men.

Politics had a way of devolving, and this level of devolution was starting to get scary, especially when the Bluebeard variant was getting tossed around. If it started spreading, the African countries knew it could turn even more dangerous, and that was the last thing anyone wanted.

And, of course, there was the problem being referred to as The Dwindle.

The Dwindle was a term used regarding the shrinking number of resources (specifically, men and women) who weren't paired or imprinted remaining in the world. People were a commodity, now more than perhaps than they had been in hundreds of years, and every single one counted.

It also meant that the protection net they'd built around the world regarding DuoHalo, the baseline DuoHalo anyway, would hopefully eradicate that virus for good.

Except the mutations seemed to keep coming.

A few had been manufactured; most had evolved in the wild. And while the Quaranteam serum seemed to be holding as a line of defense for all of them, the fear remained that one day it might not.

"Anything else we need to talk about while you two gentlemen are here?" the President asked them, some six hours into the conversation.

"That's all I've got," Andy said. "Phil?"

Phil looked down at his hands and then looked back up again. "I'm... I'm not entirely sure I want to talk about this, because..."

"Because what Doctor Marcos?" Senator Giancarlo asked.

"Well, frankly, because you may think I've gone nuts," Phil laughed darkly. "But okay, here goes, and I'm of the firm belief that we shouldn't talk about this with anyone outside of this room. I'm starting to think the nanobots are developing some kind of consciousness on their own, maybe as a swarm in each individual host, or maybe as a larger regional area cluster. Regardless, a handful of us have heard the nanobots speak to us. Andy was on set and an escrima stick slipped from a stuntperson's hand, and Andy heard the phrase 'block or charge?' while he said it felt like time slowed down to a crawl all around him. When he thought 'block,' his arm moved on its own and caught the stick in his hand before it clobbered him in the head. Linda, my lead security officer and one of my wives, heard the phrase 'arm or leg?' when she heard time slow down, and she thought 'arm,' and she used her arm to knock a bowl of scalding hot water that was slipping off a counter away from injuring her more than some slight burns. I'll give you two guesses where the slight burns were. And I..." Phil paused before glancing up at Andy with a wry smile, and Andy recognized that shaken faith in Phil's eyes. "I swear I think I heard them call me 'Father' once, but they haven't tried to communicate with me since."

"Doctor Marcos," the President started, "are you--"

"Madame President, intelligent, organized thought and action, all of this is stuff our serum might eventually be able to evolve to, and make no mistake, it is evolving inside of each and every one of us right now at a remarkable, if not alarming rate," Phil said. "Each time a man has had sex with each of his partners, that's a cycle. The nanobots inside me have evolved more than almost anyone else, with over 50 cycles and over 20 partners. I don't know if Team size matters, but I think that it might. I don't know if the nanobots are cognizant or just intelligent in the way that a computer is, reason without inception. I don't... shit, I don't know so many damn things about this thing we invented, and it's evolving at a rate that I don't know any of us will be able to predict. But I think it's something we in this room must acknowledge - I'm pretty sure the nanobots are alive, in all the ways that count, and whether they're a million tiny lifeforms flowing through our body, or one singular life form that's distributed throughout several billion people, it's something we're going to want to keep an eye on. Because at some point, I suspect I'm going to end up having a conversation with them. And I haven't got the slightest fucking clue what I'm going to say. Or what I should say..."

That sort of hung in the air for a minute or two before the meeting broke up, everyone agreeing to keep in close contact and to circle back for another meeting within a few months. Phil had told Andy all about it on the plane ride out, and the two had been engaged in some rather intense discussions for parts of the flight. The ramifications of a possible artificial intelligence were just the sorts of things a science-fiction/fantasy writer was qualified to discuss.

"Andy, do you mind if I talk to you in private for just a minute?" Senator Giancola said to him as they were being ushered out of the situation room, leaving just the President, the Chief of Staff and the General behind when the doors closed them off.

"Sure, what's up?" he said, moving over to one side, waving to Phil that he'd join him in just a minute as Representative Engle sneered at him as she walked away.

"The Chinese woman you've added to your Team," she said to him. "How much do you trust her?"

"Well, I added her at the President's insistence, but Ming's been an open book since she's joined the family," Andy said. "She's been willing to talk about anything and everything, and she's even tried to help Phil with what independent research they were doing over there to try and find their own cure to survive DuoHalo without our help." He shrugged a little bit. "The woman's been with us less than a week, Senator. It's not nearly enough time to know anyone all that well. It's not like I can tell you her favorite movie or what kind of ice cream she likes."

"Do you think she'd lie to you, or to us?"

"I don't see that she has any reason to," Andy said. "Look, Senator. You've clearly got a bigger question you're dancing around, so why don't you just ask it?"

Senator Giancola looked away from him for a second then turned to look back. "How much has she told you about the CCP?"

"I tried to give the Oversight Committee as much about that as I could while we were in there, and I know she's been talking to some military intelligence people while I've been down here, so you should probably ask them."

The senator looked into his eyes and held the gaze for an uncomfortably long moment. "If it came down to selling out this country or selling out the CCP--"

"Senator, she shot two members of the CCP in front of my cameras to save my life. We gave you that footage. There's no love lost there between them. Now why are you asking?"

She sighed, placing her hand on Andy's shoulder. "We've gotten reports that a small number of CCP loyalists have commandeered a submarine carrying ballistic missiles and are headed into a place from which they can threaten the United States to provide them with Quaranteam serum unconditionally."

"Oh shit."

"Now, it is entirely possible they do not have the means needed to launch one of these missiles, but they may simply be trying to bring it up alongside one of our coasts and detonate it, so do you think--"

"The Empty Wives will likely do everything they can to help you find and destroy that submarine, and if you're asking me if I think Ming would tell the military intelligence people she's talking to right now the best way to locate and dispatch that enemy, I would remind you that she now lives pretty close to a major US coastal city, and that she's already given up a whole hell of a lot just to prove her willingness to play ball and help her people survive."

The Senator patted him on the shoulder. "Good. I'm very glad to hear that. Because if she didn't, we may have to attempt some intensive interrogation methods."

Andy's eyes narrowed at the Senator as his hand bunched up into a fist. He was pretty sure he'd get arrested if he punched a Senator, but he was still considering it. "Are you telling me you're going to willingly torture someone who's risked her life to save mine, and has bent over backwards to prove she's an ally to both this country in general and me in specific?"

"Willingly is a bit strong, Mr. Rook," the Senator said. "I just wanted you to know that we take our national security very seriously, and these threats--"

"Come from someone else, someone who is an enemy of the person you're threatening to torture," Andy said. "So let me make this abundantly clear, Senator. If I find out that you have ever harmed a member of my Team, in any way, I will up-end the apple cart so badly, you'll think they're making applesauce in the streets. I will offer the President the chance to make it right and if she doesn't, well, then I will make sure every single person in America knows you're willing to torture an ally on a hunch, and that you can't be trusted."

"You wouldn't--"

"Senator, when I was detailing my encounter with General Ibanez, who was holding my friend's very life hostage, and I told you that I shot her, did you think I was exaggerating for effect?" Andy's voice had taken on a much harsher tone than it seemed the Senator was used to, because he could see the woman looked a little taken aback. "I was a soft, doughy fiction writer when I started on this journey about a year ago, but since then, I have learned to adapt to whatever the world is asking of me, and to meet the challenges it presents me in kind. I have been reforged in the fires of survival. So if you think just because you're a Senator means you have the right to torture people, I strongly suggest you take a long, hard fucking look at your life, because those who come to fuck with me and mine learn to regret it, sooner or later, and always at their own peril. I'd tell you to ask Covington to count off the ways he regrets fucking with me, but you know, I don't think his hand's quite grown back yet."

As Andy started to walk away, he heard the Senator's voice behind him, a slightly nervous tinge shading the laughter in the shaky bravado she was trying to portray. "I didn't expect you to be so feisty, Mister Rook. I'll remember that."

"What the hell was that all about, Andy?" Phil said the two started to walk upstairs, a couple of military guards escorting them.

"Politicians are a special kind of fucking scum, Phil," Andy grumbled. "Don't ask me to say nice things about them, because I won't." Once they got upstairs, Andy saw Ming sitting on a bench between Lexi and Melody, looking completely untortured. Fi was taking pictures out the window of the jeering crowds in front of the building. Andy rushed over and crouched down in front of Ming. "You all good, Ming?"

"Of course, Andrew," the Chinese doctor said to him. "Why wouldn't I be? They asked a bunch of questions, and I answered all of them to the best of my ability."

"And the threat they were talking about?"

"I had them contact our point person in the Navy, and they were able to verify that while the CCP had managed to get one of our subs, we'd had them on tracking the whole time, and we'd already provided that information to your Navy," Ming said, Andy's hands holding to hers a bit tightly. "It's... we're honoring our end of the deal, Andrew. I promised you that we would. Is that promise not good enough for you anymore?"

Andy looked angry, but then realized it might look as if he was angry at Ming, not for her. "No no. Ming, it's absolutely good enough for me, and it should be good enough for everyone in this country, but unfortunately, we have a handful of delusional paranoid lunatics in positions of power, and sometimes they get stupid ideas into their heads."

Ming smiled shyly, nodding as she looked down at his hands holding hers, seeming to take in why he was so angry, recognizing it was directed at those who'd interviewed her. "Then I'll just have to keep trying until they come around."

"Boss, we should probably get moving as soon as we can," Lexi said to him. "The White House doesn't like people just hanging around for no good reason, and I feel like those two crowds up front are just a powder keg waiting for a spark to go off."

"Yeah, we should definitely take off," Andy said.

"Back to the plane?" Melody said. "Or are we crashing at the hotel for another night and flying back tomorrow morning?"

"We still cool to do the thing, Andy?" Phil asked him.

Andy nodded quietly. "As long as you still want to."

"Now more than ever."

"Where we goin' baby?" Linda asked Phil.

"To go visit with the smartest person I've ever met..."