He turned the key in the lock to the flat.
This armed the trigger.
He heard the click and pushed the door.
This activated the trigger. The electrical charge went into the phosphorus bomb, which had been inert to that moment. The bomb was designed to stun and not kill. The only really evil thing about the bomb was the light.
The light was the light of a thousand suns exploding in a small room.
Henry McGee stumbled and fell before the light. The light filled the universe and was the beginning of matter or the end of matter; it was the last judgment in any case.
Henry felt his knees strike the floor and felt the bag fall from his fingers but, in that moment, he saw nothing at all. Heard the sound of the universe explode but did not feel it. Saw the whiteness of the world and the face of God.
He cried out. It might even have been a word.
52
Hanley said to Mrs. Neumann, “I think this is satisfactory.”
“Yes. But I don’t like it.”
November smiled on the capital. The sunlight was bright and brittle and the shivering wind made everyone walk with quick steps and smile at being alive on such a day. God, that’s the way Hanley felt. Bleak years and memories were shrugged off. He stood at the window in the corner office that looked down on Fourteenth Street and thought he had never felt so good. He might have two martinis for lunch, by God.
Only Mrs. Neumann sounded a note of gloom. Her voice was heavy and the weight on her shoulders had bowed them further. Each day, she was more and more bent until finally, someday, the weight of the world she lived in would crush her. Her husband saw it; those who loved her saw it; and none could do anything about it.
“Devereaux gave us an international conspiracy. He gave us a corporate head actually involved in terrorism. He gave us a solution, Mrs. Neumann, and he managed to do it with all the credit going to R Section. You can wear that credit when the budget is gone over with the National Security Adviser.”
“But where is Henry McGee?”
“He’s dead,” Hanley said.
“Is he dead? I mean, where is the body?”
“A fire in that flat. They found a female body and they identified her finally through the IRA man they arrested on the plane. Maureen Kilkenny, shot in the chest. And Matthew O’Day, facing the rest of his life in Wormwood Scrubs. And Trevor Armstrong, indicted for conspiracy to commit mass murder. And—”
“But where is Henry McGee?”
“Henry McGee is dead. They found his body in the flat. Case closed.”
“They were uncertain about the body, I read the scan.”
Hanley just hated this woman at this moment. Her relentless gloom was beginning to infect his thoughts of lunch, of the giant cheeseburger with raw onion and the straight-up martini. Make that two martinis.
He turned from the window. “If Devereaux is satisfied, I’m satisfied. Case closed.”
“And where is Devereaux? And Miss Macklin? Dr. Krueger is still hallucinating and now he says Devereaux impaled his hand on that spike.”
“Nonsense. The man is a drug addict. I think that’s been made clear.”
Mrs. Neumann stared. She stared at the blank wall across from the windows. She stared into this world fabricated by bureaucracies and run by terror. She felt so very cold and bleak that she wondered if she might just kill herself.
“Hanley,” she said.
Hanley stared at her and saw the weight on her and was moved to pity. He touched her shoulder, a thing he thought he would never do.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I know.”
“They want to give him an award. November. They want to give him an award. The Security Adviser told us. A secret ceremony, of course. No names revealed. Just an award to be put in his two-oh-one file.”
“I know,” Hanley said, rubbing her shoulder to relieve her of the burden of office.
“An award,” she said, staring at the wall.
And, inexplicably, she began to laugh.
And, just as inexplicably, so did Hanley.
53
Carl Greengold, who had once killed a man, sat behind the largest desk in the world and studied the dispatch. He had six young men in the room and everyone was devoted to him and his interests. New York screamed outside the window wall but he barely heard it. The continuous Dow ticker streamed across a second wall on a forty-foot-long lighted screen. The office was big enough so that the forty-foot-long screen still did not fill the second wall.
He had watched EAA for three weeks. Paper profits he had made had vanished as the airline tumbled down through the web of trades on the New York exchange. On paper, millions were gone. But Carl Greengold knew that paper was worth exactly what it was written on, no more or less.
The indictment of Trevor Armstrong and investigation of security lapses at the airline — the fact of the murder of four of Trevor Armstrong’s household staff, previously hushed up, now revealed to be a plot by the Irish Republican Army terrorist, Matthew O’Day — well, it had made cowards of a lot of people who held EAA.
But not Carl Greengold.
He saw what the others did not see. There was an underlying value to the airline that mere rumor or even terrorism could not eradicate. The stock was around 40 at the moment — no, 39⅞ as it just trotted across the lighted screen — but there was no panic, no panic at all.
Carl Greengold looked up at Victor, one of his gang in the office.
“All right, Vic,” he said. “It’s down far enough. I want you to buy everything at thirty-nine you can put your hands on and do it as discreetly as possible.”
“It won’t last twenty-four hours,” Victor said, speaking of discretion.
“I know,” Carl Greengold said. “Thanks to our Irish Republican Army friends — even though they don’t know it — I think I’ve just bought an airline.”
Victor understood perfectly.
54
“You killed him,” Rita Macklin said.
He stared at the fireplace. Oak logs crackled. The gloom of a Virginia evening surrounded the cabin. It wasn’t his own but a place he had purchased. In the spring, he would build a place of his own and spend his life raising timbers and making walls and stairs and rooms; he would fill out his life in this way. It would all be for her. It would be in her name and her soul, on deeds and on every record between them. He would marry her, he would court her, he would pledge himself to her, he would never lie to her and never leave her. He believed this.
“You killed him,” she said again.
He looked at Rita Macklin, whom he loved. He stared into her green eyes, which had retrieved life. He rubbed her cheek with his fingertips and his gray eyes were full of life as well and not the empty, dead things they had always been. The eyes of the soul, he thought, a strange, poetic thought that he believed he had grown incapable of thinking. The eyes are the windows of the soul.
“I love you,” he said.
“But you killed him.” She had said this before, said it in the same, flat voice, like a child who wishes her parent to banish a dream of goblins and ghosts, to promise her that they will never die.
“Yes.”
“You really did it. I can’t believe you.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s so horrible. Because it’s like someone telling me that they have finally stopped wars or that the bad things of the world are finally over.”