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.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Jake Edelman looked like he was about to have a heart attack at any moment. He’d aged terribly in the past few days, and he was neither young nor in the best of condition to begin with.
Bob Hartman, who didn’t look so great himself, entered, nodded, and sat down in the familiar chair.
For a while his boss said nothing, as if thinking of another world. Finally he looked over at his associate.
“It’s the fifteenth,” Jake Edelman said.
Hartman nodded. “You’re ready?”
Edelman shrugged. “Hell, how do I know? Do you realize what a long shot this is?”
The younger man knew perfectly. They had it all now, everything. Everything but a way out except for an outlandish gamble by his weakened boss.
“I visited Dr. O’Connell today,” Hartman said. “She’s doing pretty well, but it’ll take time. A lot of time. She’s a remarkable human being, though, Jake. We owe a lot to her.”
Edelman nodded. “Pity we couldn’t get to Dr. Bede. Dead in LA with those nice little suicide notes.”
“Mitoricine?”
“Who knows?” The older man shrugged. “The county medical examiner, who owes his job to Mayor Stratton, who went to college with Allen Honner, says self-inflicted with some trace of barbiturates and the like but no really funny stuff. He’s the ME. Who’s to argue? Bede’s in Forest Lawn already.”
Hartman sniffed derisively. “Well, I dropped in on our doctor after looking in on you-know-who.”
Edelman managed a smile. “Poor Mr. Honner still in C.C.U. at Bethesda? That was some heart attack! I understand they have to keep him so doped up for pain that he hardly recognizes anybody.”
They both shared a laugh over that.
Jake Edelman looked down at the thick transcript of the Honner confessions. “Jesus! The names in here, Bob!”
The other man nodded. “I know, Jake, I know. We’ll have a tough time getting them all. A slow process. But everybody in the Mickey Mouse organization has them, knows them, as do the RCMP and MI-5. They’re through, Jake, if we aren’t.”
“Hear about Colonel Toricelli’s group raiding Camp Liberty?” Edelman asked. “No wonder that boy, Cornish, saw jets taking off and landing regularly! It was forty-eight kilometers southwest of the Tucson airport!”
Hartman smiled. “Well, there’s nothing left now. The papers have been playing up the smashing of the terrorists and the discovery of domestic traitors. All the usual bullshit, except that it’s all true. We’re heroes, Jake. The President’s going to give you the Medal of Freedom and I’m going to get the New York office and all that. Didn’t you know?”
Edelman snorted. “You know he wants me to meet with the cabinet and the emergency council tonight. Wants to be sure he has everything. I’ve been asked to appear on tomorrow’s address, can you believe? He told me to bring maps, pictures, exhibits.”
Hartman was suddenly bright and alive. “He did, did he?” His expression suddenly feel. “They can’t be that dumb, Jake. They just can’t be. I mean, Allen Honner absolutely did not know what the hell Mickey Mouse was except a cartoon character. They must at least suspect that we’re on to them.”
“Arrogance, Bob,” Jake Edelman said. “Arrogance and conceit. Back in the old days, in World War II, the Germans conquered practically all of Europe and came within a whisker of the world. They did this even though their intelligence apparatus was so lousy the British were almost running it. They just couldn’t believe that they could be fooled by some slick tricksters. At the same time, we’d broken the Japanese code yet were so damned dumb we set Pearl Harbor up so it’d be easy for the Japanese to cripple us, and we even courtmartialed a general who said we’d get hit by the Japs from carriers there! They’ve got it made, Bob—and they know it. That’s our defense. That and the fact that they are men and women like Honner—they’re not used to being on the receiving end. Conspirators and masters of terror are quite often the easiest to terrorize—they assume you think like them. You watch.”
The tone did not have the full confidence the words conveyed. Hartman knew it, but echoed it all the same. “Go get ’em, Jake. All that can be done has been done.”
The old man got up wearily and started packing his exhibits case, then closed it, picked it up, and walked slowly for the door.
“Jake?”
He turned. “Yes, Bob?”
“God be with you,” Bob Hartman said.
Jefferson Lee Wainwright, President of the United States, was going over his speech before his cabinet and emergency council. It was a distinguished group: thirty-four men and women who, together, handled much of the top echelons of government and the military.
“And so, my fellow Americans,” he was saying, complete with flamboyant gestures, “these radicals of bygone days, defeated and demoralized but not deradicalized, went different ways. Some left the country, some went underground to hiding-holes, but some, the best and the brightest of them, went into normal careers and rose brilliantly in them. Men like Dr. Joseph Bede, who wormed his way into the National Disease Control Center and, there, in a major authority position, secretly used your tax money and your facilities to create what became known as the Wilderness Organism.” He paused and looked directly at the crowd, and in a lower, more normal tone said, “And, you know, the son of a bitch really was involved in the blowups when he was an undergrad? Man! Will that hold up!”
Suddenly he changed back into the Presidential orator.
“These radicals, still dedicated after a decade or two of dormancy, waited for the rallying cry. And it came! It came from those who had wormed their way into government and society and positions of importance! They trained at an abandoned Army test range near Tucson, gathering the scum of the earth from its four corners. And Bede gave them the weapon. The Wilderness Organism.”
Again he paused, but remained in his professional charismatic pose.
“Yes, my fellow Americans! But it was not complete. Oh, no. No such beast could be perfect without testing. So they tested it on you. On small-town America, where they could observe its properties and effects. And, when they were ready, they made plans to strike at the heart of our major cities. The tragedies in Chicago and New Orleans are witness to what the whole country could have undergone—and may still. For such elements as these still exist in society!”
He stopped, relaxed, and put down the sheets. “That’s all the further Barry got on it. We probably will go through another draft or two, but it’s pretty effective. The rest is spelling out the plans and justifying them, and you know all that by now anyway.”
Most of them nodded.
There was a commotion at a far door, and heads turned as two Secret Service men entered, flanking a tiny, strange-looking little man with a big nose.
“Chief Inspector Edelman!” Wainwright boomed. “Please come up here so I can shake your hand.” He turned to the rehearsed audience. “This is the man who saved the country!”
Jake Edelman came up and accepted the handshake and the polite applause of the bigwigs.
“Inspector, I would like you to brief us all personally on the plot, how you solved it, and how it all worked,” Wainwright said. “Barry Sandler, there, is writing tomorrow’s speech, and we want to give credit where credit is due and also get the thing a hundred percent accurate.” He pointed. “You can take that chair, there. It’s Al Honner’s. As you might have heard, he had a really bad heart attack.”