Ashmead said quickly: “Good idea. Slick, take your lady friend to her room and come right back.”
Everyone sat in silence until they’d gone, then Nye got up and ostentatiously took Chris’s vacant seat next to Beck.
Watkins said, “Beck, you traitorous bastard. Now she can go tell it on the mountain—all about Morse and the way an Agency Covert Action team killed an American citizen—a goddam hero, if that serum’s all it’s cracked up to be.”
“She’s my asset, Watkins. I trust her.”
“All right, gentlemen,” Beggs said. “Whatever your personal feelings, it’s done now. Is it acceptable to you, Ashmead, that she be allowed to continue in whatever capacity without signing that document?”
Ashmead grunted: “It was fine with me before; I haven’t changed my mind. Can we get through this debrief, please? All my people are tired and cranky, Beck included.”
It was a gentle way to find out he’d been demoted, but Beck stiffened. Then Nye’s hand touched his thigh under the table and tapped insistently until Beck reached down and took the pack of cigarettes Nye was using to prod him with.
“Fine with me,” Beggs was saying impatiently. “Let’s have the rundown on these dips you’ve brought, then we’ll open the table to comments.”
As Ashmead began reciting Yael Saadia’s dos siers from memory, Beck got out his lighter, put the cigarettes next to it on the table, and lit a cigarette, near the front of the pack, which had a crimped filter. His hands were shaking.
Casually, as Ashmead talked, Beck watched the coal burn up past the old Morse-code SOS scribed in brown fine-point marker near its tip.
When Ashmead had finished, Beck added nothing to his briefing, uncertain as to what Nye’s warning could mean. There was a possibility that any negative assessment of the surviving fact-finding party’s motives or attitudes given in the tense mood of this room could lead to the loss of the five dignitaries left from “natural causes.” Until Beck was sure that wasn’t what Nye was trying to tell him, he would keep his own counsel.
He had a good excuse: he’d been a working flight controller for the entire trip, and his agent had been refused accreditation. He used it and Watkins grew livid.
That didn’t bother Beck; he’d cut his teeth on paper wars.
Beggs was impatient with the whole process: “Commander McGrath, will you give us the intinerary you’ve prepared and fill us in on your security preparations? I’ve got a breakfast meeting with those dips and I’d prefer not to be late.”
As McGrath got up, telescoping a pointer to its full length and stepping toward a screen where he punched up prepared computer maps filling half of one wall, on which “clear” zones comprising about forty percent of the nation and “survivable zones” comprising another forty were clearly marked, Beggs said: “Mister Beck, this baby’s your brainchild and you’ve said almost nothing during this entire meeting. Would you like to tell me why that is, or make some relevant comments?”
“Mister President, I’ve been the flight controller on the P-3B for the last twenty-odd hours. Before that, I had the work of ten people to do. I can’t remember when I last had a good night’s sleep. It seems to me that you’re pretty well informed as it is.”
Beggs leaned forward: “Watkins, here, can be a little prickly, but I want to thank you personally for bringing that serum home where it belongs.” Beggs patted his left arm and winced slightly. “A job well done. With Ashmead’s team members aboard that 727, no one can accuse us of a cover-up or suspect a sacrifice play. We’ve got the P-3B’s tape and picture verification that the 727 was shot down by Soviet aircraft and, believe me, those Russkies are going to pay through the nose for it—it wasn’t just Americans they murdered: this is a crime of international proportions. So, by and large, we’re very grateful. Grateful enough that when Ashmead proposed we take the second helicopter we aren’t going to need for diplomatic taxi service and use it to try to find your family, we agreed that, under the circumstances, we ought to make it a national priority.”
President Beggs sat back, beaming as if he’d just kissed three orphans and opened an old-folks’ home.
Beck’s gut had tensed when Beggs started talking about retaliation. He’d known that Beggs was dangerous. He stared at the President, wanting to demand reassurances that Beggs wasn’t about to touch off a second nuclear exchange—the new Commander in Chief was capable of it, in Beck’s estimation, and so was America: the second-strike capability would have been the first thing to be put back on line, no matter how much damage the country’s war-fighting hardware had taken.
But Beck’s training wouldn’t let him say any of that. He said, “Thank you, Sir; that’s very kind of you. But I have to stay with my diplomats. Maybe when they’re—”
“Don’t argue with me, Beck,” said the President. “I’m not Watkins. You and your teammates are going to go find your family while Miss Patrick and her multinational buddies get the guided tour of what sights are fit for them to see. Capiche?”
Beck did, and he didn’t like the sound of it one bit.
Just then Slick came back and squeezed his arm as he slid into his seat: “She’s a good guy, Beck. She knows just what to do.”
He sat bleary-eyed and dry-mouthed through McGrath’s detailed briefing, listening with one ear to mileage stats and radiation-hardness estimates for the Black Hawk helicopters, each of which could carry eleven people and had been modified to burn methane and brought up to helicopter-gunship specs.
When the meeting finally adjourned, he said casually to Nye, “I can’t face any more bureaucratese on an empty stomach and with all these honchos to coddle those dips, they don’t need me. Let’s get some breakfast, Sam, and talk over old times.”
“I’d like that, Marc,” said Nye heartily. “Just hold on a minute while I clear it with the Chief.”
Nye went not to Watkins but to Beggs himself and came away with a clap on the back: “All set. We’re excused from the breakfast.” Then, without moving his lips: “Just you and me, nobody else.”
So when Ashmead, with a quizzical smile, asked them if they wanted company, Beck begged off: “Not unless you’re up for a nice long talk about such scintillating subjects as spacetime manifolds, electron slip, and geochronometry. Us eggheads have got to relax every once in a while, and we like to do it with numbers. It’s been too long since I’ve been around somebody else who speaks math.”
Nye, when Beck turned back, had a sour look on his face that said Beck had chosen his words badly, but Beck didn’t understand why until they were alone in a lived-in looking suite that Nye had been occupying, he said, “for the past three weeks.”
“So long? You were here before the Forty-Minute War?”
Nye was stretched out on his leather couch, jacket off, tie off, shoes off. “Sure was. And this room is absolutely secure, though I can’t vouch for anyplace else in the building. Punch up a 6-5-7-3-9-K there by the door and watch what happens.”
Beck walked over to the normal-looking computer-lock panel and did as he was told. An LCD screen appeared beside the lock-plate and started checking the security system, which consisted of six components. When it had run through every wavelength its electro-optics could scan, it hummed and winked green, then went blank.
“Okay,” Beck sighed, “I’m impressed, Sam, but I wasn’t kidding—I’m dead tired.”
“I know. So tired you didn’t even notice when they slipped figures by you that normally you’d have questioned. It’s worse than they’re telling you, Marc—all that intelligence is E-5.”
E-5: Information the accuracy of which was improbable, from an unreliable source—in this case, the United States Government.