Basically, Christie had never had a problem telling maniacs like Galen Cheney exactly what he wanted to hear.
“Walk with me,” the big man demanded. In recent days he had recovered his strength although the latest bout of fever had clearly taken a lasting toll on him. Dusk was close and nobody had spoken to Christie since that morning; it was sultry in the trees and the dampness from a brief, violent squall earlier that afternoon lingered in the branches and underfoot.
The two men had gone down to the lakeside.
The waning day was grey and the water looked glassy, the color of the clouds.
Galen Cheney carried his long-barrel .44 Magnum in a shoulder holster in full view but right now he was not pointing the cannon at the former FBI special agent. The leader of the Atsion Lake ‘gang’ was oddly reflective, deceptively normal and unusually for him, talkative.
Dwight Christie said very little.
It seemed that once he was done with his business on the East Coast Cheney planned to lead his followers to the Midwest. Presumably, because he imagined he could kill unbelievers and deflower virgins to his heart’s content out there in the ‘war zone’ without the bothersome let or hindrance, other than that of his own perverted moral compass.
It transpired that he had given up on finishing the work he had started that afternoon in February in Atlanta. God had another fate in store for ‘Lucifer’s black angel’ — Martin Luther King — and Christie’s description of the resistance’s long-standing plot to blow up City Hall had played perfectly to his warped take on reality. As to whether or not he planned to join the party on Saturday he was silent.
“I don’t want to know what you’ve got in mind, Galen,” Christie sighed. “I don’t need to know so I don’t want to know. But I do need to tell my people that they don’t need to worry about your group crashing the party.”
The two men stood at the water’s edge, with the mirror calm of the lake to the north and the sepulchral quietness of the forest behind them.
“Worry?”
Christie looked the big man in the eye.
“Yeah. If I don’t show up back in Philly by midnight tonight they’ll have to come into the forest to get you. What’s planned at City Hall is too big to risk guys like you pressing the trigger at the wrong time.”
Galen Cheney sneered, glanced away into the middle distance.
“Nobody can take us out,” he snorted, “not here in the forest.”
“No, but they can cause you a world of pain, Galen.”
“Maybe.”
“How come they know about my people?”
“They didn’t.”
Cheney stiffened, said nothing.
“But I reckoned you’d be here and I’m the guy whose job it is to see that all the loose ends get neatly tied up. After the way the thing went wrong in DC,” he grunted, “nobody wants to go through that again. Shit, a lot of good men went into the cage last year. Anyhow, you need to cut me adrift before my people come looking for me, Galen. You’ve got too many women and kids hereabouts to put up a proper fight.”
“It’s time to move on, anyway,” Cheney announced. “The women will be fine here. We’ll pick them after later,” he shrugged, “if that’s God’s will.”
Christie considered arguing further, decided not to waste his breath.
Instead he posed a rhetorical question.
“When you went up to Atlanta I was around to pick up the pieces down in Texas, Galen?”
The other man eyed him with reptile cold eyes. Presently, he turned away to stare across the lake.
“Mikey was a good kid,” he sighed. “But he never believed. Isaac believes. Isaac walks with God.”
“And that’s all that matters?” Christie asked softly.
“God sent the fire to cleanse his children,” Cheney replied. The way he said it almost made it almost sound like a reasonable proposition. “You should have left the women after Mickey was taken. Woman lives to serve man; to carry his seed and to his bidding. All women are harlots no matter how sweet their hearts.”
Christie was tempted to inquire of his companion if he had actually explained any of this to the women in his camp, who presumably, were under the impression that they were under his protection, had he not know this too would be a waste of time.
Only a fool tried to argue with a sick mind.
Chapter 48
Down below street level in what had once been the vault of the Girard Trust Corn Exchange Bank Building, only the swish of the air conditioning fans and the breathing of the men seated around the big conference table ruffled the quietness. That and the angry static buzzing from the speakers attached to the phone placed directly in front of the President.
Jack Kennedy had been visibly shaken by what Curtis LeMay had told him; and horrified by the recommendations his ranking military commander had stated to him in the most unequivocal terms.
‘Carrier Division Seven has just killed two thousand British and New Zealand servicemen, sir,’ the airman had boomed pugnaciously. ‘For no good reason that I can see other than that Admiral Bringle was operating under orders which I, and Admiral McDonald warned the Administration were just plain wrong. Diplomacy is not a thing you do down the barrel of a goddammed gun, sir!’
Three of the four other men in the room; Secretary of Defense McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of State Fulbright had blanched at this, McNamara’s ‘special military advisor’ three-star General William Childs Westmoreland, had not.
LeMay believed that getting straight ‘on the horn’ to the British was simply compounding the blunder the Administration had allowed to happen in the Persian Gulf. Having just gone to war to achieve ‘peace at any cost’ what did the President honestly think he was going to say that would ‘pacify’ the British?
However, the President of the Unites States was in no mood to listen to the professional head of a US military that had, in his mind, just fired the starting pistol for World War IV.
He had commanded that arrangements be made for him to talk to Oxford.
“Thank you for taking my call, Prime Minister.”
The transatlantic line was periodically very nearly blocked with bursts of static, the rest of the time it was just ‘clicky’, the volume swooping and dying away without warning.
“I am always happy to take the President’s call,” Margaret Thatcher’s clipped, prissy tone reverberated around the old bank vault. She sounded royally pissed off, cool to the point of frigid.
“My people,” Jack Kennedy prefaced, his drawl hesitant, uncertain and edgily angry as if he was the one who had just had his sailors and airmen butchered in a ludicrously unequal fight, “are telling me that the electro-magnetic pulses of two medium sized nuclear devices have been detected over Iraq?”
“They are correct in that assumption,” the woman shot back at him. “RAF V-Bombers conducted strikes some sixty miles to the west of Baghdad over sparsely populated areas.” Without giving Jack Kennedy the opportunity to come back at her she went on, demanding: “What of it, Mister President?”
“What of it… ”
The Prime Minister cut through the hissing background static.
“I trust and pray that you are not going to ask me why I did not give you forewarning of the activation of Arc Light protocols, Jack?”