She smiled pleasantly and went from the room.
“How sick are you, really?” Anson asked bluntly, when Cassandra was gone.
“I feel pretty shitty. But I don’t think I’m actually dying just yet, although I wish Cassie had some clearer idea of what’s really going on in my midsection.—Is there some problem, Anson?”
“I’m itching to make a move on Prime. That’s the problem.”
“You mean you’ve succeeded in discovering Prime’s hiding-place at last? Then why is that a problem? Go in there and get him!”
“We haven’t discovered it. We don’t know any more than we did five years ago. The Los Angeles theory is still top of the list, but it’s still only a theory. The problem is that I don’t want to wait any longer. My patience has just about run itself out.”
“And Tony? Is he getting impatient too? All in a sweat to make a strike in the dark, is he? Willing to go in there without knowing exactly where he’s supposed to go?”
“He’ll do whatever I tell him to do. Khalid’s got him all charged up. He’s like a bomb waiting to go off.”
“Like a bomb,” Ron said. “Waiting to go off. Ah. Ah.” He seemed almost amused. There was a curiously skeptical expression on his face, a smile that was not entirely a smile.
Anson said nothing, simply met Ron’s gaze stare for stare and waited. It was an awkward moment. There was a streak of playfulness, of quicksilver unpredictability, in his father that he had never been able to deal with.
Then Ron said gravely, “Let me get this straight. We’ve been planning this attack for years and years, training our assassin with an eye to sending him in as soon as we’ve pinned down the precise location of Prime, and now we have the assassin ready but we still don’t have the location, and you want to send him in anyway? Today? Tomorrow? Isn’t this a little premature, boy? Do we even know for sure that Prime actually exists, let alone where he is?”
Like scalpel thrusts, they were. The hotheaded young leader’s idiocy neatly laid bare, just as Anson had feared and expected and even hoped it would be. He felt his cheeks flaming. It became all that he could manage to keep his eyes on Ron’s. He felt his headache beginning to get going.
Lamely he said, “The pressure’s been rising inside me for weeks, Dad. Longer, maybe. I get the feeling that I’m letting the whole world down by holding Tony back this long. And then my head starts pounding. It’s pounding now.”
“Take an aspirin, then. Take two. We’ve still got plenty on hand.”
Anson recoiled as though he had been struck.
But Ron didn’t seem to notice. He was wearing that strange smile again. “Listen, Anson, the Entities have been here for forty years. We’ve all been holding ourselves back, all this time. Except for the suicidally addlebrained laser strike that brought the Great Plague down on us before you were born, and Khalid’s uniquely successful and perhaps unduplicatable one-man attack, we haven’t lifted a finger against them in all that time. Your grandfather grew old and died, miserable because the world had been enslaved by these aliens but only too well aware that it would be dumb to try any hostile action before we understood what we were doing. Your Uncle Anse sat stewing on this very mountain decade after decade, drinking himself silly for the same reason. I’ve held things together pretty well, I suppose, but I’m not going to last forever either, and don’t you think I’d like to see the Entities on the run before I check out? So we’ve all had our little lesson in patience to learn. You’re what, thirty-five years old?”
“Thirty-four.”
“Thirty-four. By that age you should have learned how to keep yourself from flying off the handle.”
“I don’t think I am flying off the handle. But what I’m afraid of is that Tony’s training will lose its edge if we hold him back much longer. We’ve been winding him up for this project for the past seven years. He could be getting overtrained by now.”
“Fine. So first thing tomorrow you’ll send him into L.A. with a gun on each hip and a belt full of grenades around his waist, and he’ll walk up to the first Entity he sees and say, ‘Pardon me, sir, can you give me Prime’s address?’ Is that how you imagine it? If you don’t know where your target is, where do you throw your bomb?”
“I’ve thought of all these things.”
“And you still want to send him? Tony’s your brother. It isn’t as though you’ve got lots of others. Are you really ready to have him get killed?”
“He’s a Carmichael, Dad. He’s understood the risks from the beginning.”
Ron made a groaning sound. “A Carmichael! A Carmichael! My God, Anson, do I have to listen to that bullshit right to the end of my days? What does being a Carmichael mean, anyway? Disapproving of your own children’s behavior, like the Colonel, and cutting them out of your life for years at a time? Twisting yourself inside out for the sake of an ideal and obliterating yourself with drink so you can go on living with yourself, the way Anse did? Or winding up like the Colonel’s brother Mike, maybe, the one who got himself into such a bind over his notions of proper behavior that he went and found himself a hero’s death the day the Entities landed? Is it your notion that Tony’s supposed to go waltzing to his certain death on a crazy mission simply because he had the bad luck to be born into a family of fanatic disciplinarians and hyper-achievers?”
Anson peered at him, horrified. These were words he had never expected to hear, and they came crashing into him with stunning impact. Ron was red-faced and trembling, practically apoplectic. But after a moment he became a little calmer.
He said, once more smiling in that bemused way, “Well, well, well, listen to the old guy rant and rave! All that sound and fury.—Look here, Anson, I know you want to be the general who launches the victorious counteroffensive against the dread invaders. We all wanted that, and maybe you’ll actually be the one. But don’t waste Tony so soon, all right? Can’t you hang on at least until you’ve got some decent idea of where Prime may be? Aren’t Steve and Andy still trying to work out some kind of precise pinpointing?”
“Steve has been doing just that, yes. With occasional help from Andy, whenever Andy can be bothered. They’re pretty sure that L.A.’s the place where Prime is stashed away, probably downtown, but they can’t get it any more precise than that. And now Steve tells me, though, that he’s hit a wall. He thinks Andy’s the only hacker good enough to get beyond the blockage. But Andy’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Skipped out in the night, last night. Something about getting La-La pregnant and not wanting to stay around.”
“No! The miserable little bastard!”
“We’ll try to find him and bring him back. But we don’t even know where to begin looking for him.”
“Well, figure it out. Catch him and yank him home and sit him down in the communications room until he tells you exactly where Prime is, which part of town, what building. And then send in Tony. Not before, not until you know the location right down to the street address. Okay?”
Anson rubbed his right temple. Was the pounding subsiding a little in there? Perhaps. A little, anyway. A little.
He said, “You think sending him now is really crazy, then?”
“I sure do, boy.”
“That’s what I needed you to tell me.”
Khalid said, pointing toward the hawk that came riding up over the crest of the mountain on the wind from the sea, “You see the bird, there? Kill it.”
Unhesitatingly Tony raised his rifle, sighting and aiming and pulling the trigger all in one smooth unhurried continuous process. The hawk, black against the blue shield of the sky, exploded into a flurry of scattering feathers and began to plummet toward the bare stony meadow in which they stood.