Vickers (Corp.s.e.)

FIVE

"AND I'M TELLING you I'm not fucking wearing that and it's going to take more than you two fucks to make me! Okay? Okay?"

Eggy was poising on the balls of his feet. His hands were flexing and clutching in the first feints of a particularly simian and probably bone-crushing martial art of his own devising. It wasn't enough, however, to faze the two Gorillas in Red. They stood their ground, rocklike and scowling. One held up the mellow yellow coverall with the phoenix on the shoulder and the word INDUCTEE stamped on the pocket that they seemed determined that Eggy should wear. The other laid back a pace with his hand resting protectively on his sidearm.

"It's the rules, pal. We don't make 'em, we just see that they're carried out. Every inductee gets color-coded yellow and that's it. So are we going to do it easy or does it have to be the hard way?"

"I told you, asshole, I'm nobody's fucking inductee. I'm a contract player and nobody color codes me."

Vickers took a slow step forward. He was glad that the four soldiers had been ditched along the way.

"He's got a point, you know."

"Are you refusing to wear a uniform too?"

Vickers nodded. "Uh-huh. Like he says, we're contract players. We may be on a covert assignment but there's certainly nothing in my contract that allows me to be automatically inducted into any uniformed force. I imagine it's the same for everyone else. If I've got to go back into the army, I get to keep my rank and I wind up a major."

In fact, Vickers was bluffing. He'd never had an opportunity to look at his Global Leisure contract and he didn't have a clue what they could make him do. Also, he'd never risen past captain but he was certain that the Gorillas would be ignorant on both points. They certainly seemed impressed enough to adopt a placating tone.

"Why don't you all go along with it for now and then sort it out later?"

"No way."

"So what do you want to do?"

"We get a bunch of lawyers down here and let them sort it out. Right now."

The Gorilla's lip curled. "Where do you expect to find a lawyer in a nuclear survival bunker?"

Parkwood laughed. "If there aren't fifty lawyers it's the only place this size in the Western Hemisphere where there aren't."

The second of the Red Gorillas began to look less than happy.

"We could be getting out of our depth here, Charlie. Why don't we punt this upstairs?"

The first Gorilla thought for a moment. On one hand, he wanted to see Eggy humbled but also didn't want to drop himself into official manure in the process. Finally he hung Eggy's coverall on the rack next to the four others. There had been coveralls for all.

"You keep an eye on this bunch, I'll go and get Deakin." He nodded toward Eggy. "If he tries anything, shoot him."

This descent into the bunker was something of an anticlimax. When the platform had reached the second level, the Gorillas had indicated that they should get off. The second level was far from impressive, a vast freight handling area with about the same air conditioned, white-light ambience as any mainline superfactory. Robot forklifts moved mountains of colored plastic containers and dumped them on wide, massive conveyors that carried them away and out of sight. As early as this, Vickers concluded that someone in the bunker's planning stage had suffered from an obsession with rank, insignia and color coding. The facers and handlers who moved in among the automated chaos as token human supervisors wore blue. By far the most overwhelming feature of the whole area was the newness of everything. Paint was new and slickly gleaming. Nothing was scraped or scuffed, the concrete floor was scarcely stained with oil leaks. The air was still full of the smell of packing grease and thinner. It was so new but so ordinary that it was almost unnerving. Vickers almost said as much to one of the Gorillas. The Gorilla sneered knowingly and gave a curt and cryptic answer.

"This is just the second level. Wait 'til they take you down to the bottoms."

The Gorilla whistled up a pair of yellow plastic golf carts and indicated that they should all climb in. It came as some relief as the escort of armed soldiers was dismissed. The two golf carts made their way across the freight area and turned into a wide main corridor where more blue uniformed facers hurried about their business like so many confident ants. From the wide corridor they turned into a narrower subsidiary. That, in its turn, opened onto a long, bare room not unlike the home team dressing room in a minor league stadium. It was here that the confrontation over uniforms had reached the point where Deakin had to be summoned. He arrived with predictable bluster.

"You know I have the authority to have you all shot."

"Bullshit. You're bluffing."

"I suggest you get into those uniforms while you still have the chance."

"Nobody's going to have us shot after all the trouble that's been taken to get us here."

There had been five uniforms waiting for them, each one name tagged and approximately the right size for its intended wearer.

"We think we ought to get some legal advice down here. We're all contract players and we don't need this plastic soldier routine."

Eggy nodded. "We real, Jack. Don't fuck with us."

Deakin cracked a sneer. "You don't know what real means any more. You're down here now. This isn't the upstairs world."

Vickers shook his head. "I don't think we're getting through to you, Deakin."

Eggy didn't wait to see if they were getting through or not.

"There's only one way to settle this."

He took the coveralls intended for him back down from the rack and gave them a quick shake. He seemed about to try them on for size. For an unbelievable moment it looked as though Eggy had simply upped and quit. Then he got a firm grip on the shoulders and ripped outward. The fabric tore easily in his hands. As he dropped the separated halves, he grinned insanely.

"What uniform?"

Deakin moved sideways, ready for anything. One of the Gorillas had his sidearm halfway out. One more desperate time, Vickers tried to avoid a massacre.

"Are you seriously going to shoot an expensive professional assassin because he ripped up some lousy overalls?"

The voice boomed out of nowhere.

"My sentiments entirely, Mr. Vickers."

A red light in the ceiling was flashing on and off. The heads of the new arrivals whipped around in surprise, startled by the room's display of remote potential. Deakin stiffened and involuntarily gave a half salute. The two Gorillas relaxed and put up their sidearms. The voice boomed again.

"I think we can consider this first test concluded, Major Deakin."

The red light stopped flashing. A panel in the wall slid open. A tall Hispanic stepped through. His uniform was snappier and had twice as much decorative braid as Deakin's. If there was any logic in their dressing up, he had to be at least a colonel. Vickers was starting to wonder if he'd fallen into a road production of The Student Prince. The Hispanic even had a swagger cane tucked under his arm. His smile was brisk and affable.

"I'm Lamas. Welcome to Phoenix."

"What's going on here? Are you telling us this has been some kind of test?"

Lamas was inordinately pleased with himself.

"A whole battery of them to be precise. Why, do you object?"

"We're getting a little tired of the process. We feel we're entitled to some answers."

Lamas nodded amiably. "Indeed you are. Indeed you are, and very soon you'll be getting more than you really want."

"What were you testing for?"

"For? Oh, reaction to authority, evolution of group identity, group cooperation…" He glanced directly at Eggy. "… individual levels of aggression. Tours down here are not easy and you're going to need a great deal of preconditioning. You'll find we're full of surprises."

Vickers tried to locate the corridor down which they were walking on his whatbox. The pocket data terminal was his tourist guide for the bunker. He was trying to make sense of its labyrinth of tunnels and corridors but it was daunting. They were still at the stage of conducted tours. Nobody had yet managed to cut loose from the group. Off duty, they were confined to their quarters. Not that this was a particularly great hardship. Their quarters were cramped but that was only to be expected in a bunker where space, by necessity, would be at a premium. Beyond that every obvious effort seemed to have been made to ensure their comfort. The quarters could actually have been custom built for them. Five tiny bedrooms and two equally small bathrooms opened onto a central common room. The design had started Vickers thinking that they might be just one of a number of five-person cells. Maybe this was the way that Lutesinger and Lloyd-Ransom were organizing their killers.

While they attempted to adapt to their new surroundings and figure out the possible implications of what they were seeing, the group was provided with, if not everything they desired, at least everything they could expect from a middle range Holiday Inn. The common room was equiped with two built-in data terminals and four movable video monitors. There was access to what seemed to be an almost limitless choice of books, movies and music, both on direct dail and a chip service. It was also possible to make limited use of the main data banks to review what they'd so far been taught about the geography and function of the bunker. If, however, anyone tried to go further than the instructors had taken them, all access was blocked. On the second night Parkwood had tried to hack into the master computer and discovered to his chagrin that even the initial approaches were firmly blocked. The other thing that seemed to be blocked was any information from the outside world. The bunker had a piped-through sound system, the equivalent of an internal radio system, but that just played general purpose pop music and confined its nearly mindless news reports to work quotas and inter-level basketball games. Other things were a good deal easier. The common room had a well stocked bar and a refrigerator filled with snack food. When meals were wanted or when the fridge needed restocking, all they had to do was to dial. Food and supplies were delivered by individuals whose brown coveralls identified them as domestic help. From their uniformly servile attitude, Vickers was led to assume that they were the lowest in what increasingly seemed to be a highly structured pecking order. Debbie had more than once voiced the tight-lipped comment that by far the majority of both handlers and domestics were women. As far as she could see, the bunker was reasserting some old and dubious values.

Back in the corridor, Vickers had finally located where they were on his whatbox. Unless he'd made an error, the five of them plus Deakin, who was acting as guide, mentor and instructor on this particular day, were walking north on corridor DD175 on the second level. The bunker was proving so complex that it took Vickers most of his time to keep up with the orientation lessons. So far, even with the help of the whatbox, he had only the haziest of outlines of the place's subterranean geography. His strongest general impression was that things got better as you went down. The ultra-privileged had their quarters on the seventh level-down in the bottoms. The group had yet to be taken down there but the rumors talked of almost offensive luxury. His mission to hit Lloyd-Ransom and Lutesinger was completely on hold. He didn't even know if they were actually in the Phoenix bunker. There had been no mention of either of them, which seemed a little strange if they had indeed taken over the bunker. Vickers' train of thought was cut short as Deakin halted and indicated that they should all make a turn to the right.

"We're going to make a small detour here to enable you to see a typical general living area."

They walked through an arch and into what might have been an open-plan prison or the crewdeck of an aircraft carrier. Tall, steel, four-tier combination bunk-and-locker units served as homes for maybe a hundred or more. This was the second level. There was no luxury here, just a hard functionality. The only semblance of privacy came from mesh screens that sectioned the area into a series of twelve-person cubes. A minimal softening of the cold metal was produced by a scattering of photos and trinkets hung on the mesh. Not even the long-bladed overhead fans could minimalize the unmistakable stench of too tightly packed humanity, the combination of sweat, soiled clothing and boiled vegetables.

"Who lives here?"

"Handlers."

The five looked around, shocked both by the Spartan wretchedness and also a little surprised at their own comparative good fortune. Debbie noticed something and glanced at Deakin.

"Is it all women in this area?"

Deakin nodded. "This is a female handlers' living area."

Vickers looked around with interest. Debbie was right. All the off-duty people laying in their bunks or hanging out by the vending machines on the far side of the area were women.

"Sexual segregation?"

"Pairing is frowned upon unless the bunker is actually sealed. Heaven forbid."

"If the bunker was sealed they'd have to live this way for months, maybe years."

Deakin seemed unconcerned.

"Nobody said survival was going to be easy."

This answer wasn't quite good enough for Eggy.

"How come we live so good?"

Deakin looked at him coldly.

"As you've told me so often, you're big-time security operatives. You're supposed to be valuable."

Eggy shook his head. "It don't seem right."

"What are you, a communist or something?"

Vickers noticed that not only was everyone in the area a woman, but also that everyone in the area was a passably attractive woman. It was starting to look as though there were no ugly people in the bunker. Vickers had been checking on this. The few grotesques that he'd seen were, in some way, like Eggy. They at least had something very particular going for them, and they were in an extreme minority.

It was hot in the living area and many of the women wore nothing more than skimpy, if very plain, underwear. Despite the shadow of an idea that he was somehow intruding, Vickers felt something stir inside him. Sex was something else that had been put on hold since he'd arrived in the bunker. The affair with Debbie that had only just begun at El Rancho Mars hadn't exactly been terminated. They had agreed, when it became clear the five of them were to be thrown together in a closed group, that it would be a bad idea, in a situation of one woman and four men, for the one woman to be sleeping with one of the men. It would create unnecessary tensions within the group. After a week, though, he was having to cope with some unnecessary tensions of his own. It didn't help that a pretty, almost naked handler winked at him as Deakin hurried them on through. As they came out of the living area and turned into yet another corridor, Eggy still seemed disturbed by the conditions.

"All the handlers live like that?"

Deakin nodded. "And the facers and the domestics, the blue and the brown, they have it pretty minimal."

"No shit?" Eggy was thoughtful. "There ain't too much of all people being created equal, is there?"

Debbie had also been thinking.

"What's the ratio of women to men?"

"Five to one."

"Five women to every man?"

"Jesus Christ."

"Who thought that one up?"

"There'll be an entire planet to repopulate if this place is ever used."

"It does make a certain kind of sense."

"It's fucking insanity. I want out of this place."

Debbie was glaring angrily at Deakin. He, in turn, regarded her coldly.

"You're signed on to the end of your tour."

Debbie looked bitter.

"Don't I know it."

"So where are we off to now? I thought we got through with the tour of the air plant."

Although they hadn't seen the sun for ten days, the group of five maintained the solar day and even took their meals at the traditional times; the final one was a communal supper and it was unusual that Deakin should appear in their quarters after the evening meal. It had come to be considered free time and thus it was something of an unwelcome surprise when he came into their quarters just as they were settling down to some after dinner drinking. It was their tenth day quarantined in the orientation process and tempers were beginning to fray a little.

"I thought I'd treat you to a night off."

By his own standards. Deakin was almost amiable. Fenton scowled.

"There's got to be a catch in this."

"No catch. I thought you could use a trip out for a couple of drinks and a chance to meet some of your colleagues."

"We're getting out of the bunker?"

"Of course not. Don't be ridiculous."

"So what about these drinks? Are you telling us there's a bar in this place?"

"There's a security club room that you'll be able to use once you're out of quarantine."

Eggy sucked on his beer.

"Do the handlers have a club room?"

"They have their own facilities."

"I'll bet they do."

"Who are these colleagues?"

Four other five-person groups like yourselves. Shall we go?"

As bars went it was cramped. Spartan and drab. The lights were too bright. The barroom decorations, the neon signs, the helix machines, the risque holograms were totally absent. The walls, ceiling and fittings were all made from some off-white industrial plastic. It was like going to a party in the emergency room. The whole place appeared to have been designed so it could be hosed down after a rough night. By the standards of the parts of the bunker they'd seen so far, it was close to idyllic luxury. It was already fairly full. The other groups, each with their own equivalent of Deakin, were already there. This caused Eggy to wink at Vickers.

"At least we get to make an entrance."

Vickers was equally amused by the fact that, of the four groups in the club room, two had been persuaded to wear the yellow uniforms with INDUCTEE stenciled across the front.

"It looks like we're in the top ten around here."

Fenton was also glancing around. There was a good deal of tension in the room.

"Top ten of what, I ask myself. Have you taken a look at that other bunch that refused uniforms'?"

The rival five were nothing short of spectacular. There were three men and two women. The taller of the two women was a drama all on her own. From neck to toe, she was decked out in skintight black leather. She was a masochist's dream. She wore no less than three studded belts, matching wrist bands and a collar of long chromium spikes. Her head was shaved except for a long, cossack-style braided topknot.

"You can see why she turned down a set of coveralls."

"Maybe she'd make a companion for Eggy." Eggy grimaced. "Too fucking freaky for me." The second woman made up in breadth what she lacked in height. She was a muscle builder and had the muscle builder's preference for wearing next to nothing and letting definition speak for itself. She had arms like a lumberjack but, as though in compensation, she also had truly enormous breasts and a high-piled confection of white-blonde hair. Vickers suspected that a great deal of her development was steroid growth. If she ever stopped exercising, she'd balloon up to four hundred pounds. She wasn't the only one in the group who appeared to be using steroids. Yabu was built like a sumo wrestler. Vickers knew it had to be Yabu. Both his reputation and physical description were too totally unique. The legend of Yabu was repeated in every corporation across the Free World. He delighted in a particularly artistic and often Zen violence. It was claimed that he'd devised a stomach-turning method of crushing a man's skull between his two hands so the eyes first popped and then brainstuff hosed out from the empty sockets. The second man was the basic nonentity of the bunch. He was short, slight and beyond demonstrating that, in a certain conservative way, he was something of a snappy dresser. Nothing registered. Vickers wondered if he were another cold but deadly fish like Parkwood. The real piece de resistance in the group was the seven foot black man with the long ringletted hair who was, at that moment, baring his very white teeth at Eggy. Vickers glanced at Eggy with some alarm. "You know him?"

"Big motherfucker. Calls himself Eight-Man." The club room had fallen silent; Eight-Man actually started to growl. It was a sound that Vickers would have preferred to have missed. Eggy also let out a long animal snarl. He rushed at Eight-Man and punched him as hard as he could in the stomach. Eight-Man gasped, took a step back but recovered himself. He swung at Eggy, smashing him in the side of the head with a piledriver punch that should have felled a mule. Eggy stumbled, he staggered. For a moment it seemed as though he was going to fall into Yabu but Yabu stepped neatly out of the way. Eggy appeared poised to go down like a felled tree. Then he shook his head. It was a remarkable recovery. Everyone waited for the next escalating move. And then suddenly they were in each other's arms, slapping, pounding, hugging, shouting and heehooing. The room split between relief and revulsion. There was something disturbing about the fact that there was a deep bond between these two extreme individuals.

"I didn't know Eggy had friends."

The group moved forward to the bar as a mass and began demanding drinks from a rather agitated handler who seemed a little out of her depth as a bartender. A little of the tension in the room had eased and there was a more normal buzz of conversation, albeit punctuated by the occasional hollers and bellows from Eggy and Eight-Man. Vickers had only just started his first scotch when a young woman positioned herself very deliberately in front of him. She bore an uncomfortable simularity to Ilsa van Doren except that, where Ilsa gave the impression of even coming out of the shower with perfect makeup and hair, this woman wore no makeup and had her hair in a utilitarian bun.

"Welcome to Phoenix. The way they have things set up around here, a girl can't stand still and wait for an introduction."

Vickers looked across the room. This aspect of the situation hadn't occurred to him previously. Five women to each man could produce some very competitive women.

"There seem to be plenty of men here in security."

"There's still a thousand or more eager, predatory bimbos over in handler country."

Vickers nodded.

"It's got to be a weird situation."

"Weird isn't the word."

"Talking of weird, who are the leather goddess and the lady muscle builder?"

"Isn't it always the same? Everyone wants to know who those two bitches are. The musclebound broad is Annie Flagg. She used to be the private bodyguard of Calley at Metropolitan until he choked on the canape. By all accounts it was so private that she had enough influence left over to get in here. I don't know much about Carmen Rainer except what you see. The rumor is that she ran something extremely nasty in London before the lefties took over. How do I get you to pay attention to me? Should I buy you a drink or not? By the way, my name's Singer. Abbie Singer."

Vickers shook his head. "No, thank you, I don't think I'm quite ready yet for another drink."

It wasn't that he didn't find the attention flattering. Something had triggered his built-in protective instinct. He was convinced that a short, dark man, also in uniform, was staring at him intently. Abbie Singer was talking to him but he wasn't hearing her. He wasn't even sure that what she said was meant to be heard. It was possibly just a corraling maneuver.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"You could at least look interested."

He was right. The short, dark man, even though he was doing his best to appear random and casual, was definitely homing in on him. It was this kind of certain perception that had kept Vickers living as long as he had. The small, dark man seemed unsure of his method of approach. Abbie Singer was scarcely concealing her annoyance.

"Listen, if you don't want to talk to me, you only have to…"

"No. really, it's not that."

The man made his move. "Listen, Abbie, you don't mind if I take Mort away from you, do you? There's something I have to talk to him about."

The small dark man had decided on the direct approach, an appeal to Vickers' curiosity. It worked. Vickers allowed himself to be drawn to one side. Abbie looked even more annoyed.

"I'll be waiting for you. I figure you owe me at least a drink."

"Sure, sure, I'll be right back when I've taken care of this." He turned his attention to the small, dark man and his face hardened. "Do I know you?"

"I thought you might have been sent to get me out."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I suppose you're going to tell me that you're not Victoria Morgenstern's favorite gun."

Was this one of the Contec intelligence spooks who'd gone in front of him? In this fool's case intelligence seemed to be a contradiction in terms.

"What's your name?"

"Hodding."

Vickers had already decided that Hodding was quite useless to him even in the event that he decided he'd go on with the Contec mission. His tone was one of patient contempt.

"Well, okay. Hodding, the first thing you need to know is that I was terminated by Contec and I'm now under exclusive contract to Global Leisure. You hear me?"

The piece of information seemed to shake Hodding. Vickers didn't give him the time to relax.

"And even if there might be some unfinished Contec business to concern me here, only a fucking idiot would try to buttonhole me about it in a place that's without a doubt under full eavesdrop!"

"You want to go somewhere?"

This sucker had a death wish.

"No, I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want to talk to you. I want you to get away from me and stay away from me. I don't want you to speak to me again unless it's in the course of your duties around the bunker. Are you understanding me?"

"Yes, but…"

"If you don't, I might be tempted to break your neck. Remember who I am, Hodding. You said it. I am Victoria Morgenstern's favorite hired gun."

For a few seconds, Hodding stood rooted and open mouthed. He had come to Vickers as a possible way out of a situation and he'd apparently turned up a monster. It took a final glare from Vickers to finally remind him what he should be doing. His mouth suddenly snapped shut and he moved away from Vickers as though he were infectious. Vickers also moved. He fought down the urge to look for cameras and microphones. Abbie Singer was back again. She gave him something on which to focus.

"Maybe I'll have that drink now."

She looked at him sharply. "Problem?"

Vickers took a deep breath and tried to look unconcerned.

"No, nothing. It was just some old business from before."

Abbie singer glanced at the ceiling.

"There are times when it seems a million miles away. It's all so locked in down here, it's another world."

"How long have you been down here?"

"Two months."

"When do you rotate out?"

"We don't know, nobody's been told."

"Nobody seems to be told anything in this place."

"They say it's security. You don't hear that you're getting out until literally a few hours before you go."

"Doesn't that make you crazy?"

As though to confirm that it did indeed make her crazy, she finished her drink in a single belt and moved to the bar for another.

"Sure it does, but you have to figure that it's going to be worth it in the long run."

Debbie was also at the bar. She eyed Vickers and Abbie and smiled nastily.

"Getting acquainted over there?"

Vickers spread his hands.

"Isn't this the get acquainted party?" He turned back to Abbie. "What do you mean you figure that it's got to be worth it in the long run? What's got to be worth it in the long run? Is this something else I don't know?"

Abbie looked at him as though he was an idiot who'd missed the obvious.

"We get to survive. If we're lucky enough to be down here when it happens."

"When it happens? I'd always hoped it was a matter of if."

"Not the way things are going lately. It's really starting to look grim."

Vickers was genuinely surprised. "You get news from outside?"

"Oh yeah, once you're out of quarantine, you get the internal news system piped in. These days, it's pretty much bad."

"I've been out of circulation for a while. What's been going on?"

"Basically the Soviets are finally and totally coming apart." She glanced around as though looking for some kind of confrontation. "I suppose it's all right to tell you. If we weren't supposed to talk they wouldn't have put us all here together."

"But the Soviets have been falling apart for decades."

"Yeah, but this seems to be it. It's really the last days. There's apparently been a whole string of military coups in Moscow and some of the regional centers. It's starting to look as though it's only a matter of time before bombs get loose one way or the other."

"Jesus Christ."

"The only consolation is that those of us who survive will inherit a new and cleansed world."

There was something in her eyes, a gleam that wasn't quite that of the brainwashed but was certainly some way down the road.

"Where are you recruited from?"

"The San Francisco Police Department; I was a Lieutenant of Detectives. Why do you ask?"

"No reason."

She put a hand on his arm. "Listen, I know this place can be confusing at first but you'll be thinking straighter tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? Why tomorrow?"

"They really don't tell you anything. I guess that's what happens when you pull Deakin. He's the kind of bastard who can turn a coffee break into a conspiracy. Believe me, I had to deal with plenty of his kind in the police force."

"What's going to happen tomorrow?"

"I'm sorry, I'm just running off at the mouth. Doctor Lutesinger is what's happening tomorrow. All four of us security squads are going down to the main lecture hall on the fifth level. He's coming up from the lowers to address us. It'll be the first time you'll have heard him speak. He's pretty impressive."

"Lutesinger is coming here? To speak to us?"

Again there was the slightest trace of fervor. "He's really something, you'll see. He's able to get things across so they make complete sense."

It was turning out to be a highly interesting evening. Vickers tried not to show the keenness of his interest.

"Lutesinger is in actual residence here? He lives in the bunker?"

"Sure he lives here. He rarely strays from the bottoms, though. That's why this lecture is quite an honor."

"Is Lloyd-Ransom here as well?"

Abbie Singer laughed. There was an edge of bitterness to it.

"Oh sure, Lloyd-Ransom's here. Once you get out of quarantine, you can't miss him, what with the smile and the gold braid and the pencil moustache. He's always parading around with his guards and his damn dogs." There was none of the same awe. That seemed to be reserved exclusively for Lutesinger. "They say he had a knack for turning up exactly where he's not wanted. He's also supposed to be the one behind all these Ruritanian uniforms."

"You sound like you don't like him."

"Yeah, but I know enough to be scared of him." Vickers signalled for another drink. There was suddenly a hell of a lot to think about. He wasn't sure that he was ready to see Lutesinger in the morning. Suddenly he realized it was the usual trepidation he experienced when he was about to look over a target for the first time. He hadn't given up the mission. Deep inside, he was still a Contec corpse on a mission to kill Lutesinger and Lloyd-Ransom. He'd never known that he possessed such illogical reserves of loyalty. Over on the other side of the room, Eggy was imitating Marlon Brando. "Charlie, I could have been a contender. Charlie."

"You all know the story of the ant and the grasshopper. How all summer the ant toiled ceaselessly storing up food for the winter while the grasshopper merely sang and sunned himself. You remember how, as the nights drew in and the winter turned cold, the grasshopper knew that he was going to starve. How, too late, he saw the error of his ways. Then he whipped out a gun, shot the ant stone dead and stole all his food."

There was a ripple of polite laughter from the small crowd. Doctor Lutesinger permitted himself a narrow acid smile and then returned to the business at hand.

"This poor fragment of humor in fact sums up the entire function of security in this complex. We have labored through a long summer to build this place and we must now guard that no grasshopper with a gun takes it away from us."

The term lecture hall was an extreme understatement. It was a spectacular multi-purpose theater down on the fifth level, where it seemed that few expenses were spared. It was a steep banking of some two hundred seats set into a high arching, acoustically perfect sound shell. The style was lavishly neo-deco complete with smoke mirrors and soft-light diffusion panels. Vickers found it more suited to a symphony concert than to an address by an elderly academic madman. Not that the elderly madman was doing all that badly. Just as the term lecture hall had been a major understatement, so was the title lecture. It was a full-scale theatrical production. White light fell on Lutesinger like the approval of God. Behind him, in the shadows at the rear of the stage was the forbidding, grim dark line of his dozen-strong bodyguard. Even the dumbest of the audience couldn't help but perceive that everything had been done to invest Lutesinger with every last wringing of authority. When Vickers and his companions had arrived, a hidden sound system had been playing Mahler.

"Some of those among you are newcomers, and for your benefit I shall first try to define the nature of this terrible winter that is so close upon us."

Lutesinger paused, as if for dramatic effect. In contrast to the pomp and circumstance of his surrounding, Lutesinger was a stooped, spindly, fragile figure. He seemed to lean heavily on the lucite column that served him as a lecturn. His long skeletal hands clung to it and he only removed them long enough to briefly emphasize a point. His suit was very plain and about twenty years out of date, charcoal gray in a style favored by conservative tax analysts. His voice was equally unimpressive. It could have been of an elderly teutonic speech synthesiser. There was, however, something hypnotic about the slow, almost reptilian way that he swayed slightly as he spoke. The overhead lights turned his eye sockets into black holes of certainty. He was a paradox. He seemed so ancient and frail and yet there was an energy and menace that was more than just stage effects.

"The truth is that we don't know."

Again he paused. The house lights came down and the audience vanished in the darkness. Lutesinger was all there was.

"No matter how far our computers project, no matter how long we sit and speculate, in the final analysis we always come to the admission that we have no confident idea of what a nuclear war is really like. We have a mass of data but it is wholly the result of controlled tests. We have never seen the nuclear fire blazing with the heat of anger and conflict. Our only practical experience comes from the primitive bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that ludicrous Pakistani explosion and the single airburst that destroyed Porto Alegre and terminated the incident between Brazil and Argentina. In every instance we were surprised by how little we knew and how wrong our projections had been. It would seem that if there is a single constant rule that can be applied to the belligerent use of nuclear weapons it is that both the construction and the operation of this installation was planned according to the dictates of an almost infinite pessimism."

Lutesinger's expression made it absolutely clear that the infinite pessimism had been all his. There was the smell of cigar smoke in the lecture hall. As far as Vickers could tell, it was drifting back from the front rows. It was not only expensive, it was also unusual in the largely nicotine free bunker. The front rows were taken up by the considerable entourage that had accompanied Lutesinger up from the bottoms. There was a sizeable clique of the overdone, comic opera uniforms in among them, and now he discovered that they smoked top-grade cigars. Vickers couldn't raise Eggy's quaintly socialist ire over the bunker's caste-like inequalities but the combination of blatant privilege and the stupid uniforms did disturb him more than a little, mainly regarding the insecurities of whoever designed the system. They not only verged on mania but were a direct throwback to a very Neanderthal, dress-up facism. It probably wasn't Lutesinger in the drably prim, dark suit. As Abbie Singer had told him, Lloyd-Ransom was a far more likely candidate, a career soldier with a delusion of Napoleonic grandeur. It was almost certain that he'd been one of a group of officers who'd been forced to resign their commissions in the SAS and flee London after an abortive but hastily hushed up military coup.

"In the early 1980s, a polymath group fronted by a Doctor Carl Sagan postulated the idea of a nuclear winter, a temporary ice age that might grip the earth in the aftermath of any major or prolonged nuclear exchange. The sun would be obscured by the clouds of dust that would be thrown up by so many monstrous explosions. Sagan and his group estimated that the nuclear winter might last for as long as two years. Here in Phoenix we could survive one that lasted five.

"Only science fiction has speculated on what we might ultimately find when the short-term horror abates and we finally emerge from this underground cocoon of ours. I suppose it's possible that we might find a monster-movie world of fused green sand that glows in the dark and hideous mutations. It is also possible, at the opposite extreme, that we will find we've inherited nothing, a severe, barren planet with continents that are endless desert surrounded by dead, poisoned oceans. One school of thought claims a world of grass and insects, another fantasizes about one that rapidly repopulates itself as if the atomic holocaust had never burned across the sky.

"These, however, are luxury predictions. They were framed in the luxury of pretending that the worst would never happen. These are the possibilities of 'what if rather than 'what will be.' To the idle speculator the possible is limitless. For us, the probable is likely to be something that even outstrips from their imaginings."

There was something else bothering Vickers. He'd started to sweat slightly and there were tension pains growing at the base of his skull. There was little doubt that the symptoms indicated the room was in some way gimmicked. Vickers had an exceptionally high tolerance to subliminals. Instead of blindly accepting, he suffered something akin to allergy reactions, physical side effects, when anyone was beaming suggestion at him. Vickers was quite proud of this quirk of his DNA. The physical reactions were a discomfort; a really bad burst of motivation could break him out in hives, but it was infinitely preferable to being semi-brainwashed each time he walked into the supermarket. Whatever was being used to back up Lutesinger was fairly low key, probably just enough to lull the crowd into an uncritical acceptance of the flat Germanic delivery. The room was too big for anything really direct like sub-bass boomers, squarks or miniclicks. They'd probably floated a bunch of microdelics into the air conditioner. Not enough to make anyone weird, just sufficient to make the people passive. It occurred to Vickers that it was a pretty cavalier way of treating the bunker's self-contained atmosphere. If they kept on pumping out psychotropics each time they wanted to make a point, the air in the bunker would slowly be turned into a soup capable of sending half the population off to chase dinosaurs.

"From the time that nuclear weapons were developed during the final days of World War II, there was a human pretense that we could somehow control, even prevent, their spread and their ultimate use. It was a piece of supreme arrogance to believe that, once something so powerful and so devastating had been loosed on the earth, we could stop it fulfilling its eventual purpose, fulfilling its destructive destiny, if you like.

For a while it seemed as though our arrogance was justified. From the 1950s to the mid-90s, the Pax Atomica held. We had MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction-such an appropriate acronym-to steady the balance of power. There was one factor, however, for which no one had allowed. For the mutual assurance of destruction, there also had to be a degree of equality between the protagonists. The world expected matched superpowers to remain matched. When the Soviets began their slow descent into anarchy and chaos, the balance of terror was no longer a balance. It became clear to many of us that the coming of Red Armageddon, the ultimate failure of the communists' system and the panic unleashing of their nuclear arsenal was only a matter of time."

Fenton leaned over to Vickers. "Maybe if we hadn't organized the Panic of '96, the Reds might still be okay."

"I didn't know you were a communist."

"I'm not. It's like I told you, I'm a sociopath. I'll take the opposite side at the slightest provocation."

Somebody in front of them hissed. Fenton gave them the finger. It was almost like being back in school. The front rows were taken up by Lutesinger's flunkies. Behind them were the security in the yellow uniforms-the nice kids. The hoodlums-the one's who'd hung onto their own clothes-had made straight for the back row. Lutesinger was above them all, whispering in the darkness. He continued with his chill visions.

"With the financial support of the major corporations, the bunker scheme became active. For those of us directly involved, it was a daunting task. It was possibly the most awesome construction project since the building of the pyramids. This was more than a pharaoh's vanity. Our purpose was the continuation of the human race, the survival of mankind. With so much at stake we had no alternative but an absolute determination."

Vickers thought about killing Lutesinger. Physically it'd be a breeze. He could snap the man's neck with one hand. The trick would be to get close to him. He wondered if there was any time when the man was on his own without the guards and the entourage.

"Here in Phoenix, and the other bunkers like this across the Free World, we will preserve the seeds of humanity. We will be buried here, safe while the firestorms rage and the nuclear winter closes its grip. It will be a dormant stage in the history of mankind. A waiting period until we can emerge to build once again upon the ashes. In doing this, we have become like insects going into the pupa stage. Indeed, as a species we could be seen to have mutated."

Lutesinger let everyone think about this.

"In this rebuilding, there is one great consolation. All we have to build on may be ashes but down here, in addition to the people, we have, in our storerooms, in our data banks and in our technology, the products of ten thousand years of the struggle toward civilization. We have the best that man has conceived and achieved. We have the good while the bad will have been swept away in the atomic fires. When we finally emerge it will be into a world that has been cleansed of man's superstition and folly. We will inherit a purified world."

"He talks as though it was all a foregone conclusion."

"He talks as though he couldn't wait for it to happen."

"A brand new, clean-slate world is some serious temptation."

Vickers had been unable to sleep. Huge, pink-fleshed steroid women stalked his dreams, reaching for him with their huge, slab-of-meat hands. Bent reptile men with black eyes advanced. They clutched bright chrome spears, like giant needles, in green arthritic hands. They lunged at the steroid women, who burst in explosions of blood and flesh. He fled through the darkness of a huge decaying building. His legs were heavy and his breathing labored. The building was coming apart and he was on a very high floor. The walls decomposed and ran down their steel supports like they were formed of some organic material that was suddenly putrefying. The ceilings also rotted and rained down on him while expanding gaps in the floor threatened to pitch him headlong into a hundred-story abyss. A steroid woman appeared from nowhere. She was all over him, smothering him. He couldn't breathe. He was going to suffocate. Then the floor gave way and they fell together. At that point, he decided that it was a very good time to wake up.

He found that he was sweating. It was probably the damn chemicals they'd pumped into the room while Lutesinger was doing his act. All the molecular persuaders had some kind of unpleasant after effect. God knows, he didn't need chemicals to kick off a cycle of bad dreams. In its own, there was enough in his subconscious just waiting to be dredged up to make him sweat. He decided that there were two possible antidotes. One was vitamin C and the other was alcohol. A series of screwdrivers might be an ideal solution. When, however, he stepped into the common room he found that he was not the only one who was awake and drinking. Parkwood sat in the deepest, most comfortable chair reading a novel by Celine and nursing a large scotch. He glanced up as Vickers came out of his cubicle.

"Sleepless night?"

"I hope a couple of drinks will put me out."

Vickers poured himself the first in the proposed series. Parkwood put down his book.

"It's probably whatever cloud they were floating us on for Lutesinger."

"You noticed that?"

"It could hardly be missed."

The two men sat in silence for a while, guarding their thoughts. This accidental moment so obviously lent itself to some sort of intimacy but neither seemed willing to be the first to drop his guard. It was hard to do without seeming less than professionally correct. Finally Parkwood sipped his scotch and smiled dryly.

"Doctor Lutesinger provided quite a spectacle."

"Didn't he just."

"He seemed particularly anxious to sell us the official philosophy."

"Anxious enough to dose us down the microdelics to help him get across."

Parkwood raised an eyebrow. "You thought microdelics?"

"Yeah, why?"

"I'd had much the same thought myself."

Again there was silence. Parkwood got up and poured himself another scotch. When he sat down again, he seemed to have made a decision. He fixed Vickers with a candidly even stare.

"You realize there's a madness down here."

"You realize that more than likely someone or something is listening into this conversation?"

Parkwood was surprisingly matter of fact.

"It doesn't really worry me very much. I've given this some thought. If they're paranoid enough to have the whole place wired for surveillance-and they probably are-it would have to be hooked into an artificial intelligence that's programmed to hear a range of concepts, actions and direction of conversations that have been deemed by someone to be treasonous, subversive or whatever. I tried to hack toward it by that route but the whole subject is monkeyblocked ever whichway, a fact that, in itself, proves they have something to hide. I figure they've probably given up on us ideologically. We're the hired guns. We've already proved we're subversive by going along with the programs only extremely grudgingly. We can cuss and spit on the sidewalk. Nobody's going to worry, we're a lost cause. If they come and cart Eggy away, I'll start to worry but until then… I'm not boring you, am I?"

Vickers blinked. It was the longest speech he had ever heard Parkwood make. He suspected that the cold, reserved corpse was fairly well advanced into the scotch.

"And what's this madness you started talking about?"

"Don't be coy with me, Mort. You've been aware that there's something weird about this whole setup since you had your first run-ins with Streicher. I've seen you looking at all those Ruritanian uniforms and the rest of the nonsense. You feel the same way I do."

"And how do you feel?"

"We're living in the middle of an adolescent fantasy. The huge surplus of women, all the fake pomp and circumstance. It's a wet dream, a teen-acne power trip. It's so bloody simpleminded. I presume you're familiar with the Charlie Manson story?"

"Everybody's familiar with the Charlie Manson story. They've made four movies about it."

"Remember when Charlie was at the peak of his megalomania and getting ready for Helter Skelter? According to Charlie there was this huge bottomless cave way out in the desert. When Armageddon came and the blacks start wiping out the whites, Charlie was going to take his people down into the cave where they could hole up until the devastation was complete and then come out and take over. The troglodytes inherit the earth."

"You think that's what's going on here?"

"The end of the world's a cheap shot in the mad prophet business."

"And you think Lutesinger a mad prophet?"

"Sure. He's so computerized that he may not know it yet, but yeah, he's one for sure. Plus, it's no secret that Lloyd-Ransom's been crazy as a loon for years."

"So what do you know about Lloyd-Ransom?" Parkwood's eyes slitted.

"I'm a little drunk but I'm not going to stand still for this cross examination much longer."

"I know that."

"This conversation's supposed to be a two-way street, a mutual exchange of confidence."

"So tell me what you know about Lloyd-Ransom and then it'll be my turn."

"I doubt I know anything you don't know. Regular British Army, the kind of psychopath who can survive in the military as long as he keeps on heading out for the edge. Lloyd-Ransom eventually wound up in command of one of those SAS Twilight groups. The kind that they feed on raw meat and vodka and keep in cages when they're not on a mission. He notched up quite a body count during the withdrawal from Ulster and a bigger one in Namibia. He vanished for a while after the London coup crisis, resurfaced in Africa and freelanced for a couple of years before he came to the US via Singapore and hooked his way into corporate security. I haven't come across him in five years, but the last time I had dealings with him, he was a real teeth grinder."

"The more I learn about this place the more depressed I get."

"It's early days yet. Wait until we finally get shut in for real down here. That's when it's going to get hairy."

Vickers was surprised.

"Isn't that a little fatalistic?"

Parkwood looked a little shocked. "Did you hear what I just said?"

"Sure."

"All through that damned lecture I knew they were hosing us down with something. For no real reason I kept feeling this absolute gut certainty that the end was right at hand. Didn't you feel it?"

"All I felt was the sweats and a headache. I've got a really high tolerance to suggestion. I just get psychosomatic fever."

"You're lucky."

"Maybe."

"But why should they go to so much trouble to convince us that the end is at hand?"

Vickers stood up and went to get himself another drink.

"I would have thought that it was obvious. It's straight back to your mad prophet theory. Lutesinger and Lloyd-Ransom can't wait for Armageddon. It would make them kings of the world."

Parkwood pursed his lips.

"Of course. You're right. I was simply holding off from the ultimate."

"At least they're in no position to start a nuclear war themselves."

"Unless there's something we don't know."

Vickers raised his glass.

"That's always a risk."

Parkwood nodded. "Isn't it just."

The thought hung in the air. Vickers finished his screwdriver and decided he didn't need any more orange juice. He glanced at Parkwood.

"I'm going to switch to scotch, you want me to get you one?"

"Sure, why not."

As Vickers was pouring the whiskey, the main door to the group's quarters opened and Eggy walked in. His face was a picture of satisfaction.

"Still up?"

"Sure are."

"Drinking?"

"Uh-huh."

"Mind if I join you?"

"Go straight ahead."

Eggy poured himself a huge belt of Wild Turkey and dropped a couple of ice cubes into it. He turned and found that both Parkwood and Vickers were staring at him curiously.

"What do you guys want?"

"We want to know where you've been."

Eggy laughed, swallowed about half his drink and belched.

"I'll bet you do."

"Ah, come on, you can't come walking in here at this time of night and just grin at us like the cat that got the cream. Where's the cream, Eggy?"

"Yeah Eggy, what you got going?"

Eggy sat down.

"You want to know where I've been? You really want to know?"

"Sure we want to know. That's why we're sitting here staring at you."

Eggy leaned forward like a conspirator.

"I've been up in the women handlers' quarters. You wouldn't believe it. Some of those women take the five-to-one ratio very seriously."

"How long has this been going on?"

"A week. I ought to have thought of it earlier."

"You realize you're most likely under surveillance the whole time?"

Eggy shrugged.

"Fuck them. I hope they enjoy themselves. I'm not the only one. There's quite a few guys who drift up that way when they've got nothing to do."

Vickers and Parkwood glanced at each other. They both looked a little bemused. Eggy took another king-sized slug at his drink and looked around the room contentedly.

"You know something? I could almost get to like this place."

There was clearly something in the wind. Lamas and Deakin had arrived together. Both were immaculately turned out. Lamas with his height and his somewhat condescending casual sophistication, Deakin, ramrod stiff and more puffed up than usual. There was no doubt a major announcement was about to be handed down.

"What the fuck do you think Mutt and Jeff want?"

"I figure they'll be telling us pretty soon, the way Deakin's bouncing up and down."

The group gathered around the pair of uniformed officers with a single questioning expression. Lamas had obviously decided to let them sweat on the news for a few moments. He carefully fitted a cigarette into a black and silver holder.

"Gentlemen and lady…"

Debbie regarded him sourly but didn't say anything.

"… you'll be pleased to hear that, as of tomorrow, you'll be fully operative Phoenix Bunker security personnel."

"What did we do to deserve that?"

Lamas exhaled cigarette smoke straight at Eggy.

"Sometimes I wonder."

Parkwood stepped in before the exchange could be extended.

"Will we be assigned to a regular set of duties?"

"Actually no. In many respects you're all spare parts until such a time as the bunker is sealed. You'll be given missions from time to time but otherwise you'll be able to continue your life of leisure. As it happens, though, your first mission is tomorrow."

Debbie still looked distrustful.

"What kind of mission?"

"Very routine. A major celeb will be coming down into the bottoms with an entire entourage. There'll be blanket security. You'll all get individual briefings."

Fenton raised an eyebrow.

"Individual briefings?"

"You'll all be fulfilling slightly different functions."

Parkwood wasn't quite satisfied.

"How is this group going to be organized? Is one of us going to be put in charge or what?"

"You'll all have equal status under my command for the time being."

Eggy spat on the floor.

"All for one, one for all?"

Lamas smiled coldly.

"Look at it this way. You'll get to see the bottoms for the first time. They really are very impressive."