A War of Shadows

TWENTY-SEVEN

He was a tall man of about forty-five, in a brown suit and yellow shirt with brown-and-yellow striped tie, horn-rimmed glasses, and the look of a successful business executive.

He’d received a call from one of Edelman’s team on some breakthroughs, and since actions were still in progress they’d requested that he come over there to get the information. He needed and was entitled to it; Allen Honner was the President’s Chief of Staff.

A sleek, black car passed the east gate checkpoint at the White House and rolled up to the entrance. The two men inside looked like what they were: career FBI types. One got out, nodded to Honner, and opened the rear door for him. He got in without hesitation, and the agent, picking up a briefcase from the front seat, switched around and got in next to him.

The car started off, passed back out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, and turned right toward the FBI Building.

Honner was confident and interested. “I’ll be having a late dinner with the President,” he told the agent beside him. “I’ll need all you’ve got. You know there’ll be a meeting on the fifteenth on the status and need for the emergency, and a speech on the conclusions reached there on the sixteenth.”

The other man nodded. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I expect we’ll have most of this case wrapped or on the way to cleaning up by late this evening.”

Honner glanced around. “Hey! Wasn’t that the Hoover Building we just passed?” he asked, suddenly disturbed.

The other man shrugged it off and reached into his briefcase. “Don’t worry about it. We’re not going to the Bureau. Too many leaks there. We need absolute privacy for this.”

The Chief of Staff seemed a little upset, and he started to press the matter when the agent’s right hand came out with a small pistol with silencer attached and pointed it at him.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Honner demanded. “Who are you?”

The agent’s left hand fumbled in the case and emerged with a gas-powered syringe. “I’m a fan of Mickey Mouse,” said the agent, and, pushing the injector against Honner’s buttocks, fired the drug through the Chief of Staff’s expensive brown pants.

A few blocks down they switched to a D.C. police van, which roared off, lights flashing. None of the patrols, sentries, and the like checked it. They turned and headed back along Pennsylvania Avenue, reached the circle, turned onto Wisconsin, and headed into Georgetown, turning the lights off now. Down into the old but fancy original section they drove, finally reaching the spot they wanted, turning into a back alley, and pulling up behind a particular house.

The agent fumbled in Honner’s pockets, got a key ring, and got out. Quickly and efficiently they got the unconscious man out of the van and through the back door of the house. Four other agents, two male and two female, walked down the alley from opposite directions and, one by one, entered the house. The van drove off, to be replaced in the D.C. police garage.

It was a safe house nobody knew, all right. Allen Honner awoke, bound hand and foot, in his own bed.

“What the hell is this?” he demanded. “Who are you that you dare this?”

A thirtyish man in shirtsleeves, looking tired and serious, came up to him. “We’re the FBI, Mr. Honner,” he said dryly. “The part you don’t own.”

Honner’s face showed panic. “You have no right to do this!” he almost yelled at them. “No right at all! Do you realize who I am?”

Bob Hartman nodded slowly. “We know, Mr. Honner. And, yes, we do have the right. You gave it to us. You and whatever others are involved in this. Preemptory arrest of citizens whenever an officer believes there is cause, suspension of habeus corpus, suspension of civil rights. Yes, Mr. Honner. We do have the right. And, thanks to directives coming out of your office, and those of the Justice Department, we may use any and all means of questioning if it is in the interests of internal security. My boss thinks you’re a traitor, Mr. Honner. That gives me the right to break every damned little bone in your body, stuff you with any and all mind-probes, drugs, and other devices, and do whatever I feel like to get the truth.” He smiled evilly. “And I’m not even responsible, Mr. Honner. I’m just following orders.”

Allen Honner was scared to death. His face was white, and he was sweating profusely despite central air conditioning.

“Look,” he said. “I’m powerful. One of the most powerful men in this country! Anything you want! Power, money—you name it. Anything. Just—don’t hurt me.”

Bob Hartman gave a dry chuckle. “All right, Mr. Honner, I’ll make you a deal. The truth. The complete and full story, no commas and periods omitted. That’s the price, Mr. Honner. The truth, or we get it our way.”

The Chief of Staff looked around at the grim faces staring down at him on his own bed. Fear was mixed with confusion. “I don’t understand you people! What’s in it for you? What the hell will this get you?”

Hartman shook his head sadly. “I see a brilliant mind reduced to a pathetic pawn. I see men and women afraid to move, to think. Others—who knows how many countless lives wracked by a disease that was engineered by human minds. Engineered!” His voice exploded with rage. “Crippled minds, crippled bodies!” Suddenly his tone lowered, became calm and mixed with pity. “No, Mr. Honner, I don’t think you and your kind will ever understand what we get out of this.” He turned to one of the women, nodded, and she brought up a huge case filled with, it turned out, medical gear and monitors. Honner’s eyes fell on it and went wide with terror.

“All right! All right! What do you want to know?” he cried, then seemed to sink down in the bed, resistance gone. And yet, as they stared at him, a curious half-smile crept into his expression, and his eyes seemed wild. “I’ll tell you what I can,” he said. “It won’t matter. It’s too far along. Even if you know everything now, there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop it.”

Hartman didn’t like the switch in the man’s manner; that last was spoken not with bravado but out of conviction. He began to have the creepy feeling that Honner just might be right.

He reached over, got a chair, and sat down in re-versed position, leaning forward on the chair back. Recording devices started.

“Whose phone rings when I call 1-500-555-2323?” Hartman asked.

Honner chuckled. “One of mine—if I’m there. If not, one of my assistants’. The coder on the phone makes the voice identical no matter who is speaking.”

Hartman nodded. “Where was the Wilderness Organism developed?” he asked.

This, too, amused Honner. “At Fort Dietrick, at NDCC, of course. A private foundation we helped endow started the work based on the Cambridge stuff long ago. A couple of solid scientists felt they knew where both we and the Russians had made our mistakes, and saw the total ban on research as dumb. They, like we, were convinced that other nations were working on the recombinant DNA problems, and that we would be vulnerable, wide open in fact, if that were the case. It was good defense and good science. The work was there; you couldn’t wipe it away. It was inevitable that it be pursued. When President Wainwright was elected to his first term, we arranged for that and a number of other projects to be transferred, funded, and masked by NDCC, supposedly as cancer research—which it was, too, among other things.”

“Where are the remaining blue cylinders and Wilderness Organism cultures?”

“Some are at Camp Liberty, some are at Dietrick, in a special bunker, and the rest—most of it—is with the poison gas stores at Dugway in Utah,” Honner said. “Except, of course, for the stuff already distributed. We didn’t want some of it out very long. It’s subject to easy mutation, and that lowers the effectiveness of the vaccines.”

Hartman took a deep breath. “Who are ‘we’, Mr. Honner? Who, besides you, is involved in this?”

“Patriots,” Honner said. “Men and women of vision. This isn’t anything that’s just grown in the last couple of years, you know. It began, in fact, before I was born—a group of patriotic, concerned citizens who saw how this country was going to hell. We were weakening ourselves and retreating from the world in a slow, steady erosion of power and authority—matched by the same disintegration of society inside the country. Open sex, the breakup of the family, the discarding of old values without gaining or adding any new ones. These people deplored this, organized, worked long and hard to set this up, to stave off the eventual collapse either by external attack or from within until they were in a position to control this country and reverse the declines. It was a long time coming—I doubt if a single one of the original people is still alive. But they did their work well. Younger people, bright, ambitious people were raised and nurtured and came up slowly within the system, aided by political maneuvers to place one key person here, another there, working, waiting, until the seat of power was also ours, occupied by one of our own people.”

“President Wainwright,” Hartman said. “They always said that he was the type of man you’d invent for President. Now you’re telling me he was invented?”

Honner nodded and laughted. “And, you see,that’s why you can’t win. It isn’t one guy like me in a power position, or a dozen. It’s hundreds and hundreds, all in the right places. We control the Executive Branch. We control five Supreme Court positions—thanks to some timely and easily arranged natural deaths. We already had two seats anyway. Some top senators and key congressmen. And, most important, a lot of key civil service bureaucrats.”

Even though Jake had guessed it and Hartman had suspected it, the sheer scope of the conspiracy staggered him. And, once in those positions, those key people had unlimited access to information on most Americans, including others who worked for government. The IRS could tell them just who was spending what on what. The Treasury had a record of every check anybody ever wrote. Blackmail, pressure, and outright power bought the others—and, in many cases, bureaucracy did it of its own accord. If the proper codes and the proper signatures were on the proper forms, you could get away with anything.

Honner talked on and on, and the more he talked the more confident he became, and not without reason. After all, what could Bob Hartman and Jake Edelman do with all this? Go to the press—which was totally controlled and censored? Get powerful political help? Who was who? Even Honner wasn’t sure of everybody; they needed a computer to keep track. And on the sixteenth President Wainwright would announce that the plot had been smashed, that it was in fact internal, and launch a massive purge of government. He would eliminate—literally —those he needed to, consolidate his power, so that only his own people held the reins in all three branches of government. Scapegoats would be trotted out and shot, some after giving drug-induced confessions. The takeover would be absolute; within one to two weeks after the address, the last echoes of democracy and freedom in the United States would be gone, probably forever. Even the radicals—the products of schools, universities would be purged. A new generation would be raised under different standards according to government edict. Conformity would be enforced by merciless pressure; the price of not obeying would be too great.

The plot was cracked, all right—but not in time, not in time at all. Honner, Hartman thought with a sinking feeling, was right. They were discovering the evidence of a coup d’etat weeks after it had already taken place.

Sam Cornish walked into the darkness of the subway tunnel. He suddenly felt a little foolish and out of place, and he looked at the pistol in his right hand and thought, What the hell am I doing here?

It was not complete darkness; signal lights and occasional bulbs planted for emergency use every ten meters or so made it possible to see without breaking his neck. Once or twice he came close to the third rail, the source of power and current for the trains, but managed to avoid stepping directly on or leaning into a hot section. He frankly wasn’t certain what was hot and what was not.

The next station was some twenty blocks or more away; there was no sign of it in the ghostly-lit tunnel whose bulbs spread out before him almost to infinity. He knew what lay at the next station: a squad of riflemen and a flamethrowing team, the same as was in back of him. She must know it, too, he thought, still surprised and still not understanding why he was still surprised. His mind kept going around and around like that.

Either he would find her or he would miss her. If he did the latter, well, the next group to come in sure wouldn’t. And if he found her?

Why had he taken the pistol? It was Suzy out there, Suzy running and hiding in the dark, not some mysterious ogre.

There was a dripping sound, some leak or something that reverberated up and down the empty tunnel.

Yes, it was Suzy out there, he told himself, but not the Suzy of the camps or the Suzy of the good days just over in the Carroll County woods just over? It seemed years ago—but the Suzy of Kennedy Airport and the marshland near the end of the runways. The Suzy who told them to hold the vertical mortar steady as she timed the takeoff of the great silver bird with hundreds of innocent and non-idealogical people on board, and smiled and laughed as she timed it just right and dropped it in and it had gone whomp and torn into that plane and she’d laughed when the explosion littered the sky and found pleasure in the screams, the screams, the screams…

Several minutes in, he thought he detected movement. There was some sort of sign up there on the right, and he was sure that some figure had moved near it. Just a shadow, but…

The sign marked an escape shaft in case the trains got stalled without power or crashed or whatever. “There was also a pumping noise as it became clear that the shaft was also used for providing some ventilation for the stagnant air of the tunnels.

How many between here and there? he wondered.

Would Edelman and his people have them all covered?

But, no, he scolded himself. He was thinking like himself. He would be looking for a way out; not Suzy, oh, no. She had a mission to complete. She couldn’t get on one of their fancy big trains now, no, but she could if possible still do a little damage. What would Suzy do?

Air shaft, his mind told him. Not only fresh air down but dead air and exhaust and fumes up. An outlet to the air.

He walked more quickly now, toward that exit sign. And then, there he was. He stopped and listened. There were noises all right, slight and easily overlooked, but there, beyond the exit.

“Suzy!” he shouted, his voice echoing eerily up and down the length of tunnel. “Suzy! It’s Sam!”

The sound of his own voice obscured all other sounds for a moment.

“Suzy! Don’t do it! It’s a plot by The Man, Suzy! We’ve been suckered by the pigs all along! None of the big boys will die—they got the real stuff! Just you and me and a lot of ordinary people! Suzy! Don’t you end up working for the other side!”

Still there was no response. He pushed open the exit door and walked into the shaft. Surprisingly, even to him, he felt no fear at all. He no longer had anything to be afraid of. That, in itself, was a wonderful thing, and he savored it.

There was a wide metal ladder in the center of the shaft, and, looking up, he could see light from the distant street. For a moment he thought he’d guessed wrong, but then he saw her, on a metal ledge not eight centimeters wide, near an access valve for the air system. She was just standing there, looking down at him, but she had opened her shirt to expose the two gas nodules, and had the two long, thin spray tubes out of her pants legs. One hand steadied her on the precarious perch; the other was on the left gas cannister.

He started up the ladder.

“Stay back, Sam!” she warned him. “This isn’t any of your fight. I don’t know if you finked or what, but it’s not your fight, Sam. You don’t belong here. Go away.”

He continued up at a steady pace. Now he was only a few meters below her.

“Stop where you are, Sam, or I’ll just let these jets go right now,” she said. Her right hand, which she’d been using to keep her balance, came free, and she grasped the right tube and stuck it in a cavity in the wall behind the air intake valve.

He stopped and stared at her, surprised now at himself as tears welled up in his eyes.

“Stop, Suzy! Please! This is crazy! There’s no reason…” he pleaded.

“Only in blood can come the revolution,” she said, eyes not on him but on something distant, something neither he nor most other human beings could see. “The blood of the innocent, though it count in the millions, buys the future of mankind.”

“Suzy, if you don’t stop I’ll have to shoot you,” he said, his voice choking up. “I can’t let you do it again. Not a second time, Suzy.”

Suddenly she seemed to notice him again, and she looked down on him with an expression of mixed arrogance and bewilderment. “Why, Sam?” she asked. “Penance for the plane job?” Her hand moved to the trigger for the cylinder.

He could hardly see her, yet the pistol came up and pointed at her all the same. “No, baby,” he said. “Love.” He fired the pistol, not once, but all five rounds in the chambers, and he continued to pull the trigger, clicking away at the useless pistol.

Suzanne Martine stood on the perch, that same expression still there but the arrogance now fading, leaving only the bewilderment. “Sam?” she said, the tone carrying that bewilderment to him as if, for the first time in her life, she questioned everything.

And then she fell, dropping down the shaft, her body striking the ladder once and bouncing, until it hit the cement floor and lay still.

He stopped firing and looked at the pistol again in wonderment, as if he had no idea how he’d gotten there. He let it drop out of his hands and it fell, too, to the floor below.

He started climbing for the sunlight above him.