The Fury and the Terror (26 page)

"Because those things effect the aura in the area of the implant."

"Oh. You read his aura too."

"I read everyone's aura. I can't avoid it. Yours is telling me a few things this morning."

"I don't want to hear it."

"I'm not talking," Bertie said with a hint of smugness. "Not now, anyway. Whetstone's aura doesn't betray evil intent. If he's being used by MORG, that's how they're doing it. To keep track of the Senator, of course. Last night when I spotted the black helicopter I thought, maybe they've come for him. Which would mean it was on."

"What was on?"

"What MORG has planned for the immediate future of my adopted country."

"Spell that out?"

"I don't know yet. The other girl knows, I think. Eden Waring. The one we came out here to find. I've found her, by the way."

Sherard gave her a look. Her eyes opening wide, Bertie dared him to scoff. He shrugged instead.

"If it's true, all to the good. I want to cut this thing short and get us well away from here."

"The problem is getting to Eden. That won't be easy."

"Why not? Where is she?"

"A place called Moby Bay, which is about six hours from here."

"How did you come by this piece of news?"

"Tom—I was on the Astral plane last night, where there are no secrets, but beyond that I'm really not prepared to tell you more."

"I'm not privileged to understand, something like that?"

"Because I, I just don't think you can handle it. I want you to trust me. Eden, she's in a kind of prison. Hard to explain what that means, but until she realizes what is going on she ought to be safe there. Before we go to Eden—Danny Cheng said it. We must see the woman in the hospital. The one who survived yesterday's plane crash. Barely survived, she may not live much longer."

"I like this less and less. However inadvertent, I've exposed you."

"Oh, if only I'd been awake to enjoy—"

"Bertie."

"I'm sitting here in this towel, and you ought to see your aura. You don't have to say anything, Tom. Oh, maybe just—'Take off your towel, Bertie.'"

"We could hope for a more leisurely and less distracting time. There's a rightness that just isn't ours yet. To put it another way."

Bertie rubbed the back of her neck. "But we might have been blown to pieces a few hours ago. So. There are pros and cons. I am still kind of jumpy. Astral Visits take it out of me, and you've got so much on your mind you probably wouldn't—"

"Only the events of the past few hours. Only the death of my wife. If I couldn't protect Gillian, how—what am I supposed to do when you're knocking around the Astral by yourself?"

"No problem, I'm safe there. I have a wonderful guide. Tom, listen. Gillian never told you, but her powers were only half of what they were when she was my age or younger. It just happens. Otherwise she would have seen it coming, and that gunman on Madison Avenue would have been meat loaf. But I've got everything Gillian had at her best, and more. Remember what I almost did to poor Mr. Whetstone?"

"Vividly."

"Nobody's going to hurt me. Or you."

"So you're protecting me now?"

"Just like a man. You do come riding in on a very high horse sometimes. I need you, Tom. We're on a hunt. I need your skills if I'm going to be successful."

"A hunt, is it?"

"I know how you feel, but I have my Gift for a reason. I'm called to do this. I can't refuse."

"Do what, Bertie?"

"Eden has to tell me that."

"Didn't you say there were no secrets in the Astral?"

"I haven't met her yet. She can't get there, not from Moby Bay."

"Sounds like a fascinating place." He ran out of words and stared unhappily at the carpet. After a minute of that Bertie got up, holding the towel with one hand. She put her other hand on his shoulder, then moved it to cup the side of his neck in her palm. He looked up.

"You see, it's, the fact is, you are—"

"I know, a bit much at times."

"And did you have to be so damned beautiful? An abundance of gifts I can't be convinced I deserve."

She touched her forehead with her index finger.

"Whatever's going on in here, Tom—"

Her hand moved to the center of her breastbone.

"It's just an ordinary workaday heart. Like yours. Everybody's. Same old moonshine and tears. But my brain was touched by lightning before I was born. Should have killed us both, my mother and me. Glad it didn't. The lightning, or what it left behind, is still there. In a certain state, just this side of sleep, I see it sometimes. A mind within my mind. A separate consciousness. Quiet. Glowing. Powerful. I see by its light things you'll never see. Don't think about the lightning, Tom. I swear it will never hurt you. Just think about me."

"I do. I always will."

With a smile she wiped a leaking eye, bent down to kiss him lightly. "You shaved already? I'm going to take a shower and get dressed before I eat."

"I should make a couple of phone calls. Old friend and client of my father's who I think is still living in the Bay Area. If I'm going on a hunt, I want the right equipment to do the job."

WASHINGTON, D.C. • MAY 29 • 6.45 A.M. EDT

T
hey had breakfast and then it was lights down and the DVD player on 1 in the room beneath the hotel, a room that floated cagily inside a concrete bunker, furnished in angles of steel and suede, nothing remotely decorative, no personal touches. Soundproof, shockproof, impervious to ESP, it was the den of a man with a hush-hush empire to run in a city of mazes and cross-purposes founded on a swamp. Victor Wilding inserted the disk in the DVD player. Rona waited, yawning. Crackle of grit in her jaws. She'd put in a strenuous twenty-four hours, with only two short intervals of sleep since Hawaii.

During lulls she still saw Frank Romanzo's head disintegrating in a blood storm, which was hard on her nerves. Fit of temper, no practical resistance to her trigger finger. But Kelane Cheng had refused to be broken. It was a lesson Rona had to consider once again. There were absolutes in the human spirit.

Then Rona's husband was right there in the darkened room, speaking again in full sentences. For a few moments her mind refused to assimilate this. She pressed back into the low curve of her chair on an outgoing tide of blood and was forced to shut her eyes, feeling coldly depleted, syncopal. She uttered sounds that might have been laughter.

"What's wrong?"

"I'm okay." Still in a fragile state of mind, Rona had another look at the tube. She had grown accustomed during the past few weeks to the Clint Harvester sequestered at Camp David, his mind as potted as a mummy's. Now he was speaking in his familiar westerner's cadences of acts of terror in formerly untouchable American venues, innocent cities of the heartland. Speaking, in the past tense, of events still on the drawing board as far as Rona knew. And Rona knew everything. Speaking of the nation's resolve to end its ordeal at the hands of faceless extremists taking advantage of too-liberal immigration laws. Speaking of the need for strong countermeasures that would begin with the reinstitution of a military draft for eighteen-year olds of both sexes and the nationalization of police and sheriff's departments. Speaking of a massive purge of all criminal elements, known and suspected.

"Whose voice?"

"His."

"How?"

"All the words are there, in the old speeches. We've prepared new speeches, like the one you're listening to. We can write as many as we need, for whatever occasion."

The explanation, and the paste-up speech, pleased her. It had been the sound of his voice that had attracted Rona to Harvester, before she knew who he was. She'd first heard him boldly amplified across the fairgrounds on a Fourth of July in Great Falls, Montana. Running for governor. No previous political experience. They were celebrating one of those old-fashioned Fourths. There was a PRCA-sanctioned row-day-o. Bunting, bands, politicians, and good-looking college girls on horseback.

Rona was twenty-five. She had flown up to Montana with her second husband Travis and three of his buddies to fly-fish. She'd been married two months and four days and had already made up her mind that three months with Travis would be her limit. He'd been sober less than half the time since she'd met him. A pre-nup existed, but Rona had had the opportunity after the whirlwind romance and Vegas hitching to dig into his irresponsible past and get, on tape from one of his close friends whom she'd fucked for the purpose, details of a hit-and-run with Tray at the wheel, two left for dead and a young girl now confined to a wheelchair, elements that wouldn't play to Travis's advantage on
Hard Copy
. And his daddy was still sufficiently competent to make massive changes in the will.

"The mouth movements. His expressions."

"Morphing software any kid can buy. It's a fun thing."

"He looks, God, what a thrill. I'm shivering. The return of Clint Harvester. How long can we get away with it?"

"Limited exposure. Getting into and out of the helicopter on the south lawn. A motorcade or two. Clint at Burning Tree. Waving, smiling. He hasn't lost that smile. Of course no one gets close enough to ask him any questions. Dunbar can carry on with the grunt work, cabinet meetings, state dinners, Clint will always be indisposed. All speeches, like this one, will be canned. All we need is the face. The setting, his suit, the pattern of his tie, those elements are interchangeable and undetectable under normal scrutiny.

How long? We don't want to string it out. First, the good news of Clint's return. Then the second nuclear event on U.S. soil occurs. While the nation is still in shock, give it a week I'm thinking, comes the assassination. Clint Harvester dies in your arms. You take it from there."

(Rona had been a serial adventuress from puberty, thumbing her way along many roads in several countries. Sniffing out the humanity that remained in the used-up places, the hardscrabble byways of a continent. Getting wise to herself. Good footwork when trouble loomed. Carried a sharpened screwdriver in her boot. Also a little bottle of knockout drops for the would-be hustlers during those times when she needed to appropriate some cash.
I knew how smart I was the day I was born
. After a year among her sainted surfers she'd been located by Mom and Dad, Henry on the wagon for the fifth or sixth time during their long-suffering saga, back to the block and cleaver. In the keeping of her parents once again she'd finished high school and actually enjoyed it this time. Elected prom queen in spite of the Black Widow tattoo just below her right shoulder. The day after her eighteenth birthday she left home for good, landed in the Haight. Still the epicenter of the flower-power culture and a heavy drug scene. A dovecote of the charmed, the futile, the precociously wasted. On weekends no room to move but in the street. Rona had tried a lot of substances, walked the edges a few times, but lack of control over herself dished up fears she couldn't handle. At eighteen she had the innate selfishness of the driven but undirected. Restless in pursuit of a destiny that was hard to divine. She only knew, instinctively, that it had to do with the acquisition of power.

(Nixon had fled the White House with one last mawkish grin for the cameras, pausing beneath the blades of Marine One, unaccompanied by his near-catatonic wife. In Frisco Rona tumbled to activist politics. The entertainment and social values appealed to her more than causes. But she got herself arrested several times on behalf of the farm workers and dissident Cal Berkeley students and Huey's Panthers over there in Oakland. Charges were routinely dismissed. Involuntarily hanging around courthouses and the OPD, Rona met a young attorney named Bill Frederics, who was on a fast track with the Organized Crime and Criminal Intelligence Branch of the California Department of Justice. She moved in with him after the second date.

(Through Frederics Rona had access to classified information, including her own FBI and CIA files. She learned a great deal more about power, and who really had it in a democratic society. The solution to extinguishing the ideologies and uncivil strife of minority groups that the government found bothersome was to establish a rationale for treating those groups as criminal organizations. New strike forces, such as the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, could be created by presidential decree, immediately becoming autonomous monsters with no congressional oversight possible. ODALE, which soon became the Drug Enforcement Administration, was empowered to draw support for its operations from other government agencies such as the FBI, the IRS, and Customs.

(Only MORG declined to cooperate. The White House, with Gerald Ford completing Nixon's term, failed to make an issue of MORG's refusal.

(Rona had never heard of Multiphasic Operations and Research Group. Frederics didn't know much about them, either. Other agencies, state and federal, had a certain muted fear of MORG agents.

(Interesting, Rona thought.

(She began to read about the White House, then to visit regularly in her dreams. Uninvited. She opened impressive doors and walked down corridors lined with portraits of former heads of state and the occasional bucolic painting. In the way of dreams, people came suddenly from doorways, menacing at times, asking her questions.
Oh yes I belong here
. Her heart thumping badly. Up a flight of stairs. A glimpse of a man in a bedroom who might have been the President. Buttoning his shirt. Shooting a look her way. She recognized LBJ, a sulky hound dog with terse mean eyes. Giving him a big wave.
It's okay, I belong here, Mr. President
.