different. He dropped the shovel and dug with his hands, carefully, tenderly. He reached into the dirt, groping, finally touching the body. He brushed the dirt away. It was Peepers.
Henry knelt beside the dog’s grave and wept, exhausted with sadness and shivering with relief. But the other grave waited for him. He covered Peepers and replaced the stones atop his grave and began to dig again.
It took hours to excavate. Who could have dug this, he wondered. Not a child. It must have been Jill. Her car was gone. She must be alive. But so much was unexplained. The dead man in Helen’s room. The graves. He puzzled on these things as he dug. Bits of stone and a large root were piled into the hole. It had been chopped in two. Could Jill have managed that?
Somewhere in the middle of the night a chorus of frogs began croaking. His back strained from the effort, but he couldn’t slow down; he couldn’t allow himself to break the furious rhythm of motion, pressing the spade into the soil with his right foot and heaving it over his left shoulder, again and again without pause. And then he felt the outline of a hardened form beneath the soil. He brought the candle to the lip of the grave. Once again, he used his hands to dig. He could feel a body just inches below the dirt. As he was scooping, he felt something hard, something metal or plastic. He pushed the dirt away furiously. It was Teddy’s football helmet.
A cry escaped his lips. Teddy was gone. Teddy, his miracle child.
Henry sat back against the wall of the grave. He had thought Teddy was safe. His clothes were gone. His backpack was gone. Helen was gone. Jill’s car was gone.
He forced himself to brush the dirt away from the face inside the helmet. And there was Jill, her dead eyes staring at him.
What had happened here?
Jill was dead. Not Teddy. Henry was totally numb.
After he reburied his wife, Henry sat on the porch of the playhouse he had crafted for his children. He had placed the candle on top of Jill’s grave. Awful things had happened to his family and he had not been here to take care of them. He tried to keep his grief at bay but it was banging relentlessly on the door of his consciousness. Jill was dead. She was wearing a helmet. Her car was gone. The children were gone. He would have to find them. Somehow. The pieces didn’t fit together. But Jill was dead.
Drowning in shame and sorrow, reeling in confusion, he crawled into the playhouse and slept for hours.
50
The Cosmos Club
Streets were dark, traffic signals didn’t function, banks had stopped making loans, grocery stores were practically bare, the internet was still down, D.C. was sweltering, but high-end hotels and restaurants found a way to reopen. The Mandarin Oriental, Trump International, the Palm, Cafe Milano—one by one, the oases of influence came back to life. The rich and powerful had a ledge of safety that couldn’t be reached by ordinary people, such as reporters for The Washington Post.
Influenza had taken a toll on Tony Garcia. He had lost his sister and his wife, and he had nearly perished as well. He lived above a Wok and Roll in Adams Morgan, alone now except for a chihuahua, with no utilities, in the middle of another record-setting autumnal heat wave. Survivors were still recovering from the contagion. Some were physically broken; nearly everyone was crumpled by grief.
Cyberattacks had sabotaged the news business. A few television stations were getting back on the air, but newspapers were publishing only sporadically. The Post, thanks to its billionaire owner, fared better than others, but it also struggled to get answers from a government that had suddenly gone silent. Rumors and imagined conspiracies shoved real news aside. As a result the country was a cauldron of emotions—paranoia chief among them.
There was still no clear evidence that the cyberattacks originated in Moscow, although everybody knew that they had. The genius of the new kind of hybrid war that Russia was waging was not only in its deniability. There was also its near-magical ability to stir up insurrection—such as the Army of American Patriots, fomented by Russian bots and manifested in the actual recruitment of hundreds of armed American citizens subverting their own government, unaware that they were acting as a fifth column for the Russians. Putin had created the American Patriot movement and then