Despite himself, Mansard grinned. "It'd be an all-time coup. Can we do it?"
"If we get the hardware that we need."
"So what would we need?"
"With those new DL-70s from Sony, it'd be a breeze, but we don't have the DL-70s yet."
"I thought that it was all arranged. Didn't we have the tithe barriers beaten?" Mansard asked.
"On paper we did. We had the stuff ordered through a Chilean purchasing agent. It's the usual way of getting around the Japanese embargo. Everyone does it."
"So where are they?"
"Last I heard they were still sitting in a warehouse at Santiago airport. You know what the Chileans are like."
"Can we get them in time?"
"I sure as hell hope so. Marty's on the phone right now."
Mansard started flipping through the script. "The interior effects seem well within our capabilities."
Gadd nodded. "No problem. Although Proverb does seem to be going for the edge."
Mansard continued to examine the script. "He does, doesn't he? But, then again, Arlen Proverb has never been your run-of-the-mill preacher."
Arlen Proverb had never been anything like a run-of-the-mill preacher. In the tight power frame of the theocracy, Arlen Proverb was the rebel, the perennial thorn. Although, for public consumption, it was all brothers in the Lord, there was a deep and hostile gulf between Faithful and his cronies and the flamboyant Proverb. He simply had too big a following for them to off him. Where Faithful and his circle radiated a scrubbed corporate wholesomeness, Proverb ranted and roared and dressed in Nashville spangles. He was a wild man, a throwback to the tent shows and the snake handling of the raging Bible belt, a hunched and brooding figure in a white jumpsuit that could suddenly lash out with an Old Testament fury. He was a throwback, though, who performed in front of a battery of state-of-the-art special effects of such intensity that they were close to psychedelic. He was adored by the unemployed, the blue collar, the marginal, the brought down, and just about anyone who had a head of anger that he wanted to blow off. In that, he was the closest thing the country had to an aboveground political opposition. Unlike Faithful, who expected passive acceptance from his devotees, Proverb encouraged his followers to be an integral part of the show. They stomped and clapped. They had visions and talked in tongues. They even writhed on the floor in convulsive spasms of ecstasy. In fact, ecstasy was what set Proverb apart from the others. He delivered an old-time, holy roller good time, and that made him dangerous.
Mansard stopped at a page in the script. "He's actually going to use 'Love Me Tender'?"
Gadd shrugged. "That's what it says,"
"He's sailing kind of close to the wind, isn't he?"
"He's always attracted Elvi in his crowds."
"But he's never pandered to them before."
The followers of Elvis Presley were another problem that the Faithful orthodoxy had with Arlen Proverb. The Elvi flocked to his shows in droves, out in the open in their scarves and badges, sideburns and sunglasses. There was no doubt that the Elvis cult was a non-Christian belief, and on a number of occasions plans had been hatched at a high level to suppress it. Somehow, though, they had never been acted upon. Elvis was so deep in the psyche of poor white America that even the Fundamentalists were scared to mess with his memory. They seemed to suspect instinctively that they might be dealing with a sleeping giant who, if roused by oppression, might become quite uncontrollable. For Proverb actually to go out of his way to court them was something else entirely, and it would undoubtedly widen the gulf between him and the hierarchy.
Mansard grinned. "Proverb's up to something."
Jimmy Gadd was not smiling. "Do you really think we should be getting involved with him?"
"We've always done Proverb."
"If he's planning on tweaking Faithful's tail by playing up to the Elvi it could be the start of a whole holy nasty. We don't want any of that nastiness to rebound on the company."
"Nothing nasty can rebound on us. We're just the hired whores. Next month we'll be working for Swan. Sublime to ridiculous. We take no sides. They know they need us more than we need them. In the meantime, we'll give Proverb his four horsemen. Maybe they'll all want monster sky walkers after that. We can get rich and go put on rock-and-roll spectaculars in Australia."
Gadd grinned wryly. "That'll be the day." Mansard became professional. "Let's get to it."
"Should I start Manny on the visualization?" Mansard nodded. "Yeah. The sooner we get the master drawings, the sooner we can start on the rig design."
Kline
Cynthia Kline came out of the heavily protected street entrance to the CCC Astor Place complex and discovered that the combination of the bread riot and the bombing and the official response to both had turned the streets to total chaos. The only traffic that seemed to be moving belonged to law enforcement. Police Pharaohs and prowlers, the deacons' Continentals and their sinister buses with the blind windows and cargoes of unfortunate prisoners, came and went at high speed with sirens screaming and lights flashing. Cynthia had originally intended to take a cab home, but that was clearly impossible. The subway offered no better prospects. It was well past the rush hour, and there were still lines of people waiting to get into the Astor Place station, casting nervous glances at all the police activity. A number of uptown lines had failed, and a lot of commuters seemed resigned to the prospect of spending the night on the platforms. The buses were equally bad. The insides were packed, and still more people clung to the sides and the backrails even though they did not seem to be going anywhere.
Cynthia got a tight grip on her shoulder bag and started out in the direction of Third Avenue. Her clerical auxiliary uniform helped to get her through the knots of officers who filled the sidewalk in front of the building. They all seemed so tightly wrapped, so dangerously primed for violence, and she wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. After all her training and even after operating under cover for so long, the proximity of so much armed authority still made her nervous. She would never forget the horrors of '04 and '05 when so many of her friends had vanished.
Things were no better on the corner of Third. Civilian traffic had been waved over to the curb, and even the pedestrians who usually crowded the corners of Third and St. Marks had melted away. She had no more chance of getting a cab than she had of flying in the air. She had to face the fact that she was walking home. As she started north up Third, she wondered how many streets in the twenties would be closed off because of the riot.
"Want a ride, baby?"
Cynthia swung around, ready to tell whomever it was to take a jump. But it was a regular police cruiser that had pulled up at the curb. Two young patrolmen were grinning at her from behind the steel grill, their expressions suggesting that their intentions were less than honorable. They were out to have a little fun.
"Going our way?"
Her instinct was to tell them what they could do with their ride, but at the thought of the long walk to her apartment, she put on an idiotic smile and pushed her voice up half an octave. Experience had taught her that cops were easier to handle if they thought they were dealing with Betty Boop.
"I need to get to Thirty-eighth and Ninth."
"No problem."
"You want to squeeze in the front here with us?"
Cynthia regarded the helmets and riot guns racked and ready between the front seats. Fitting her in was an obvious physical impossibility.