Authors: Ben Bova
On the phone's picture screen, the features of James J. Halliday took form.
"Good evening, Meric," said the President.
I glanced from the phone to the TV, where the President was saying, "I understand that automation has taken many jobs, but that's just a short-term situation . . ."
"Good evening," I said to the phone image. "Your brother's out there walking on water."
"That's Johnny for you," said the President. "He loves it."
"You don't?"
"I'm not much for crowds. I've always preferred Hamilton to Jefferson."
I squinted hard at the phone screen. The wine was making my head thunder.
"It won't do you any good to try to figure out which one I am. You can't tell by looking, and I'm not going to spell it out for you."
"Why'd you call?" I asked.
The President said, "I wanted to make one final appeal to you to call off this ridiculous press conference tomorrow afternoon."
"No deal," I said.
His face hardened. "You'll never get to it. You understand that?"
"Doesn't matter. The story will pop."
With just a hint of exasperation, "You still don't seem to understand, Meric, the power in my hands. By tomorrow afternoon those tapes you mailed out will be destroyed. The people who've been working with you will be silenced. It won't work, Meric. It's doomed."
"Then why call me?"
"Because I'm not a willful slaughterer. I don't want to kill anyone . . ."
"Tell that to your deceased brethren. Tell it to the General, I'm sure he'll understand."
"Meric! Don't force me to act."
"Mr. President . . . this nation has survived an awful lot of stupidity in the White House. We've had ignoramuses for Presidents, we've had innocent do-gooders and out-and-out crooks. But I'm not going to willingly allow a madman to take the job."
"You're a fool, Albano."
"I know it. And I'm scared shitless. I don't want to die. But I can't step away and let you take over. I literally cannot do it! Understand that? Even if I wanted to, I couldn't. What the hell good would it be to live, if I couldn't live with myself?"
"We've already got Ms. Clark," he said flatly. "And Solomon's . . ."
I didn't hear the rest. I felt as if I'd been quick-frozen into solid ice. From somewhere far away, I heard my own voice, grim and tight, whisper, "No deal. It doesn't matter. No deal." And I hated myself for saying it.
I've never seen James J. Halliday's face look so ugly. "All right, Albano. You won't make it through the night."
The phone screen went blank. I clicked it off. On the TV, James J. Halliday was saying:
"That's what the Presidency is for—to listen to the problems of the whole nation, not just one section or one state, and then to take actions that will solve those problems."
They had Vickie. And I wouldn't,
couldn't
, make a trade for her. I don't know how long I sat there, trying to rationalize it. But the simple truth was that Vickie wasn't as important to me as nailing the Halliday murderer. And my own skin.
I realized that my apartment was no longer safe. Especially with Hank gone. But where the hell was there safety? My eyes fixed on the TV screen again. That vast crowd. Out there, they'd never be able to get to me. I could blend in and disappear.
And besides,
I thought,
that's James John out there. If I can get to him and stick with him for the next eighteen hours, we might both make it out of this alive.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
But first I had to get out of my apartment alive. I peeked through the window shutters and saw people walking along the street outside, and the usual solid line of parked cars. Could be an army of hired assassins out there. And I didn't have a car; I'd have to get the door guards to call a taxi for me.
I paced the living room fretfully for a few minutes, certain that I couldn't stay in the apartment, scared at the thought of stepping out into the open, trying not to think about Vickie and what might be happening to her.
Finally I couldn't stand it any longer. I went out into the corridor, after a careful peek from my door, took the emergency stairs two flights
up
,
walked all the way across the building to the elevators on that side, and rode down to the laundry room. The garage was one more level down, and if anybody was waiting for me, he'd at least have a scout down there. And out in the lobby.
Tiptoeing back to the delivery ramp behind the laundry room, I looked out into the night-shadowed driveway where the trucks pulled up. There was a gray minibus parked out there, with two men sitting in the cab.
Good Christ
,
I thought,
they really are out there waiting for me!
I hurried down to the laundry room. Alex, one of the night security guards, was whistling down the hall toward the guards' locker room.
"Hi, Mr. Albano," he said cheerfully. "Washin' somebody's dirty laundry?" He laughed uproariously at his own joke; he knew my job, and knew that I could take a kidding.
"What're you doing down here?" I asked.
"Gotta take a leak. Hey, you been watchin' those protesters on TV? That's a helluva crowd they got out there. Your boss is talkin' to 'em."
"I know." Then the sudden inspiration came. "Alex . . . do you have a spare uniform in the locker room I could borrow?"
"Huh?"
Thank God he had a sense of humor. I told him it was a joke, and paid him fifty bucks for his extra cap and jacket, and the loan of his car. I promised to leave it at the cab stand three blocks down the avenue.
"Will you take care of the ticket I get when the Pee Dees spot it at the cab stand?"
"Sure."
He trusted me. And my fifty dollars. So, with my heart hammering, I drove slowly out of the garage, wearing the guard's cap and jacket.
Sure enough, there was a blocky-looking character at the exit gate.
The lights weren't all that brilliant down in the garage, although the area around the exit gate was lit better than I would have wished for. The man, whoever he was, kept the gate's bar down so that I couldn't pass through. He stared hard at me.
"Where you going?"
I tried to imitate Alex's accent as best I could. "Gotta get Mr. Kent's pree-scription." And I made a booze-swilling motion that helped to hide my face.
He grinned and reached into the gate booth. The bar swung up and I drove out onto the avenue, very careful not to squeal the tires. I parked at the cab stand, left the cap and jacket on the front seat of the car, and took one of the cabs.
"You ain't supposed to park there," the cabbie said as I opened the rear door.
I ducked inside. "It's a joke I'm playing on a friend," I said.
His black face, staring back at me in the mirror, wasn't at all amused. "Some joke," he grunted.
The crowd around the Capitol was so huge that the traffic cops wouldn't let us get within five blocks of the Hill. Or stop. They kept waving us on, until we were detoured down Virginia Avenue, halfway to the goddamned Navy Yard. The driver fumed and grumbled up front while I fumed and fretted in the darkness of the back seat.
He wormed through endless lines of parked buses up along Sixth Street Southeast and got as close as the Library of Congress Annex. The police had sawhorses and fire trucks blocking off the streets beyond there.
"Close as I can get," the driver said.
I gave him a five, "It'll do." I felt a little annoyed that he didn't even go through the pretense of trying to make change.
I walked through the soft night air past an empty fire truck, toward the library's main building a couple of blocks away. There wasn't much of a crowd down here, but there were lots of people milling around, clustered in little groups on the corners, sitting on the curbs. Young people mostly, kids, black and white mixed. Normally, in this particular neighborhood, the streets are abandoned after dark. Too dangerous. But not tonight. These out-of-towners were strong enough in numbers to provide their own safety.
Their older peers were out in front of the Capitol, peaceably assembled—as the First Amendment puts it—to seek redress of grievances. These kids had just come along for the ride. And to be thrown in the front lines by their elders if it looked like a clash with the police or Army was coming up.
But the President was taking the venom out of the throng. There'd be no bloody confrontation; he'd turned it into a question-and-answer session, air your gripes, come to me all ye who labor and are hard pressed. He was good at it. James John, that is. Back at the White House was that other one, the one who'd phoned me, the one who had Vickie and was going to try to kill Johnny. And me.
I got a couple of odd looks from the kids as I purposefully walked toward the library's main building. I obviously wasn't one of them. Wrong uniform: business slacks and shirtjac instead of glitterpants and vest. Wrong age. Wrong attitude. But they didn't bother me.
The guard at the library's side entrance did. He was in
his
uniform: plastic armor, riot helmet with visor pulled down to shield his face, bandoleer of gas grenades, dartgun, electric prod, heavy boots.
"The building is closed, sir," he said, very politely and steel hard.
I pulled rank. Dug out my ID and said, "I've got to get to the President, and the crowd's too thick up front of the Capitol. Thought I'd go through the slideway tunnel."
He bucked me upstairs. Called his sergeant on his helmet radio. The police sergeant came up and offered to provide me with an escort to get me through the crowd in front of the President. I declined. "Don't want to make that much of a disturbance in front of The Man," I said. Actually, I didn't want to call that much attention to myself. I might be a clay pigeon, but there was no sense painting myself dayglo orange.
The sergeant called a captain who finally relented and personally escorted me into the library, down to the connecting tunnel, and along the rubbery moving belt that slid us both to the Capitol building. Secret Service men were prowling around the slideway's terminal area, and I had to show my ID again and go through a security arch to prove who—and how unarmed—I was.
The guy in charge of the security detail looked so much like McMurtrie that I wondered if they had cloned Secret Service men, too. He took me in tow and waved the police captain back to his post.
"The Capitol building is sealed shut against visitors," he said as we rode the elevator up to the main rotunda.
"Good," I said, wondering if this guy knew that there was a brigade of men just like him who were looking for me.
"The President didn't inform us that he expected his press secretary to meet him here," he said suspiciously.
"It's a hectic evening. None of us has planned much of this in advance."
He accepted that, although it was clear he didn't like it. Unplanned events such as sudden decisions to address large crowds informally, and having visitors like the press secretary drop into a cleared area, made him unhappy. Good. That meant he wasn't in on the plan to get me. I hoped.
We stepped out of the elevator into the vast, empty, echoing rotunda, our footsteps clicking hollowly on the floor. It was only partially lit; you could see your way across the floor all right, and up in the dome, Brumidi's blasphemous painting—turning Washington into a small-time rococo Italian saint—was all too visible. But the galleries that ringed the dome, several tiers up, were darkened.
"I'll have to ask you to stay in the rotunda area," the security man told me. "We've sealed off the rest of the building. The President will come back here when he's finished speaking to the crowd."
I nodded, just as the crowd gave a cheering roar. It sounded almost like booming surf inside the rotunda.
Although the main expanse of the rotunda's floor was empty, there were knots of well-tailored men and women at every corridor leading out. It felt a little eerie, having the whole damned place to myself, with no tourists clicking their cameras, no troops of Scouts goggle-eyeing their way around, nobody bumping into you, no tour guides talking about marble or historic events or the problems of painting the inside of the dome so that the picture showed proper perspective from the floor.
I glanced up at Old George. He looked kind of uncomfortable up there in rococo heaven. I felt damned uncomfortable down here on the modern earth. And exposed. This wasn't what I had planned on at all.
And then I noticed that I wasn't alone. Sitting on a bench near the bronze of crusty old Andy Jackson was General Halliday. Alone.
I went to him.
"What're you doing here?" he asked, without preliminaries.
"Hiding." I sat down beside him.
He gave me a sour look.
"One of your boys is out to get me."
"You've got a hell of an imagination."
"He phoned me this evening. Said they've taken my assistant prisoner. There was a goon squad waiting for me at my apartment building."
The General shook his head disbelievingly.
"If you're lucky," I said, the heat rising in me, "you could get to see a real Western-style shootout right here in the rotunda. His goon squad against John's security force. Maybe we ought to buy score cards . . ."
"Don't be an idiot, Albano," the General said. "If he wants to nail you, he won't do it that way."
"Whose side are you on?" I asked him.
He just looked at me.
"You know which of them is killing the others. Do you want to let him succeed or stop him? Or are you content to let 'survival of the fittest' be the rule, and go along with whoever's left?"
His expression didn't change or soften in the slightest. But his voice sank to a whisper. "I wish to hell I knew what to do."
"If I make it through the night, I'm going to give the whole story to the press," I said. "Tomorrow."
"Then my guess is that you won't make it through the night."
"That's why I want to stick close to John."
"Why him?"
"He was talking with the crowd when his brother called me. So it can't be him."
General Halliday said nothing.
"And I don't think it could be Joshua," I went on. "He didn't strike me as having the balls for this kind of thing. So it must be either Jeffrey or Jackson."