“I don’t know anything about this, Mr. President.”
“Right. Hold to the party line. For whatever it’s worth, I’m not a stubborn idiot. I’ve spent the last few weeks agonizing over this. I’ve spoken with Party Secretary Nalivkin. Do you know what they’re doing? They’re negotiating with the bogey in Mongolia. He says the world is on the brink of a socialist millennium. That’s what the spacecraft in Mongolia is telling him! Arthur, give it to me straight…Is there anybody I can talk to who can put me back in the chain of command? I am not an unreasonable man. I can be reasoned with. God knows I’ve been thinking this all over. I’m willing to rethink my position. Have you heard about Reverend Ormandy?”
“No, sir.”
“He’s dead, for Christ’s sake! They shot him. Somebody shot him.”
Arthur, face pale, said nothing.
“If they aren’t talking to you, then who would they be talking to?”
“Have you called McClennan, or Rotterjack?” Arthur asked. Both of them had sworn allegiance to Crockerman even after their resignations.
“Yes. I can’t get through to them. I think they’ve been arrested or kidnapped. Is this a revolution, a mutiny, Arthur?”
“I don’t know, sir. I honestly don’t know.”
Crockerman muttered something Arthur didn’t hear clearly and hung up.
47
Reuben Bordes met the Money Man near the Greyhound bus terminal on Twelfth Street. The white-haired, paunchy stranger wore a dark blue wool suit, pin-striped golden silk shirt, and alligator-skin shoes. He seemed perfectly happy to pass Reuben a plump gray vinyl zippered bag filled with hundred- and thousand-dollar bills. Reuben shook his hand firmly, smiled, and they parted without a word said between them. Reuben stuck the envelope into the pocket of his olive-green army coat and hailed a cab.
Instructions given, he sat back in the seat, happier than he had ever been in his life. With this money, he could be traveling in style now: taxicabs, airplanes, fine hotels wherever he went. But more than likely the money would be spent on other things. Still, the thought…
There was an extensive shopping list in his head. His first stop would be the Government Printing Office Data Center. There he would purchase four sets of data disks containing the entire public-domain nonfiction records of the Library of Congress. Each set, on five hundred disks, occupied the space of a good-sized filing cabinet, and he did not know why four copies were necessary, but he would pay for them all in cash with about half of the money in the envelope.
He stood in line at the service counter of the Data Center for ten minutes, and then stepped up to the clerk, a young, balding man with a full red beard and a sharply appraising stare.
“Can I help you?” the clerk asked.
“I’d like four sets of number 15-692-421-3-A-G.”
The clerk wrote the number down and consulted a terminal. “That’s nonfiction, complete, L.C.,” he said. “Including all reference guides and indices?”
Reuben nodded.
The clerk’s stare became more intense. “That’s fifteen thousand dollars a set,” he said.
Reuben calmly unfolded a roll of money and counted out sixty thousand-dollar bills.
The clerk examined the bills carefully, rubbing them, holding them up close. “I’ll have to call my supervisor,” he said.
“Fine,” Reuben said.
A half hour later, all the formalities cleared away, Reuben wrote down where he wanted the sets sent — a mailing address in West Virginia.
“What will you do with them all?” the clerk asked as he handed Reuben the receipt.
“Read them,” Reuben said. “Four times.” He regretted that flippancy as he walked south on Seventh Street toward the National Archives, but only for a moment. Instructions were pouring in rapidly, and he had little time to think for himself.
January 5
Lieutenant Colonel Rogers came out of a sound sleep at four a.m., just minutes before his wristwatch alarm was set to go off. He deactivated the alarm and switched on the small lamp at the head of his narrow bunk. For a luxurious minute, he lay still in the bunk, listening. All was quiet. All calm. It was Sunday; most of the Forge of Godders had moved to Furnace Creek the night before for a huge rally planned this morning by the Reverend Edwina Ashberry.
He dressed quickly, putting on climbing boots and pulling two hundred-foot lengths of nylon rope from a knapsack in the trailer’s corner. Rope in hand, he looked down, brows knitted, at the small desk and telephone. Then he dropped the ropes on the bunk and sat in the chair to write a letter to his wife and son, in case he did not make it back. That took five minutes. He was still ahead of schedule, so he spent five more minutes carefully shaving, making sure every long bristle on his neck was scraped off: military clean. He brushed his teeth and combed his hair meticulously, glancing at the letter. Unhappy with the wording, he quickly recopied the message onto a fresh piece of paper, signed it, folded it into an envelope, and posted the envelope on his message board with address and instructions.
At four-thirty he descended the trailer steps and stood in the bitterly cold desert darkness, a steady wind dragging at his coat and pants legs. At the east end of the camp was Senator Julio Gilmonn’s car, in a fenced-off square reserved for the munitions locker. Gilmonn himself stood with two aides, a handsome, stern-looking middle-aged black woman and a young white male, bulky and clean-cut, near the inner gate leading to the rock.
“Good morning,” Rogers said as he approached. Gilmonn extinguished a cigarette after taking one last frowning, concentrated drag and shook Rogers’s hand.
“There are still a few Forgers out there,” the senator said, pointing to the outer-perimeter fence. “Have you made any plans for clearing them?”
Rogers nodded. “In fifteen minutes we’ll set off a siren and announce an emergency situation. Nothing specific. Then we’ll evacuate the camp through the corridor. If the Forgers haven’t cleared out by then…” He shrugged. “The hell with them.”
“That could alert the…bogey,” the young aide said.
Rogers acknowledged that possibility. “It hasn’t done anything for months that we know of,” he said. “We’ll just take the risk. There are about a thousand people out there now.”
The woman regarded Rogers with an expression between severe doubt and motherly concern, but said nothing.
“Who else is involved?” Gilmonn asked.
“I’m having two of my staff officers help me carry the weapon to the entry. They’ll evacuate at that point. And there’s your expert, of course. Where is he?”
Gilmonn pointed to a figure walking through a spotlighted area a few dozen yards away. “He’s coming now.”
The “expert” was a young naval lieutenant, lean and of middle height, with thin, precise eyebrows and short-cut tight brown hair, dressed in civvies and carrying a large bag and a briefcase. He greeted the others quietly and asked to be taken to the weapon. Gilmonn opened the gate with the key Rogers had entrusted to him, and then lifted the trunk lid. Within was an orange-striped silver cylinder about a foot and a half wide and two feet long, lying in an aluminum cradle. The radiation-warning trefoil was prominently featured at three points on the cylinder.
“We don’t have a presidential authorization code,” the lieutenant explained matter-of-factly. “So I’ve had to take an unarmed, stockpiled missile warhead and remove the PAL — the permissive action link, the code box. This causes a fatal mechanical failure in the detonator and proximity fuse — fatal to the mechanism, not to me. So I’ve had to engineer my own time fuse and detonator and match them with the warhead. With higher authorization, I’ve taken a Navy plane wave generator and klystron and the necessary black boxes and cobbled them together. I can guarantee that it will work.” He smiled almost apologetically and turned to Rogers. “Sir, you will be able to deactivate this weapon, should you encounter something unexpected, right up to the last second before it goes off. So pay close attention.”