“I thought we were supposed to take you to the Blue Estate on the National Guard base.”

“Plans change. I need to get to my plane. They tell me you can get me there.”

He said “I” and “me.” Not “us.”

I searched his eyes, looking for remorse, looking for some trace of compassion for the people who’d died to get him through the swarm and up to this room. Not seeing all that much of it.

“Had to be a hundred of those things,” he said.

“They’re people,” I said, mostly to be a dick.

“They were people. They’re not anymore,” he said, which was fair enough, but I did not give him even so much as a grunt of agreement.

Murphy, who stood next to me, said, “We came here because it was a pre-selected rally point. But there were more of the, um, infected in the streets. The motorcade was swarmed. That’s when we lost the AIC and a lot of the others. Had some marines in plainclothes, too, but the crowd . . . well . . . ”

I nodded. “How many made it up here?”

“Counting Mary here,” said the president, “and Murphy over there, I have five Secret Service left in my detail. And two of my aides.”

“That’s it?” I was appalled. The president motorcade is made up of twenty-five to thirty vehicles. Lots of security, as well as members of the press, and key aides. There’s often a hazardous materials team riding point with local police behind them and more cops in follow cars at the tail end. It’s a lot of people in a lot of vehicles. And the president’s car is armored. Traffic is blocked ahead and on cross streets. “Sir, what about your family? Were they with you?”

The president shook his head. “I sent them to a secure location in Virginia.” He paused, then added. “We haven’t had a status report yet.”

I listened for some real heart, some pain, some depth of feeling in his tone, but there was not enough of it there. It surprised me. The news reports always showed him with his pretty wife and three kids. They were always smiling, always clinging close to one another. Which meant what, when measured against his reaction now? Was he so good at playing the controlled politician that his hurt didn’t show? Or was he one of those sociopathic types for whom everyone else—even family—were a little unreal, like window dressing?

Or was I being too hard on him? After all, he’d just seen a lot of friends die, along with the people sworn to protect him. If San Diego was any indication of what was really happening across America, then there could be hundreds of thousands of people dead. Maybe a million. Was the calm, indifferent façade just that—a front erected over his very human fears? Pretending detachment so that he stayed detached? The more human part of me wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.