That car would be approaching any minute now.
Abraham had not slept in a very long time now. Since his rebirth, time had held a different meaning for him. It passed not in terms of days and hours, but in tasks and accomplishments. Behind him was the visit to the nuclear plant yesterday. Ahead of him was the murder of the president. Beyond that there was nothing.
He had gone to Pennsylvania Yankee in a disguise prepared for another disciple long before. He had descended into the bowels of the reactor’s secondary loop on a surprise inspection, watched only cursorily from the hatch above. He had reached the valve in question and affixed C-4 plastic explosive fully confident it would not be removed, even if discovered. Then he tacked on a sign: DO NOT REMOVE! ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION.
Anybody who got close enough to see the charge would read that sign. From there, he quickly located the main conduit that linked the computers to the thousands of valves and controls in the labyrinth of multicolored pipes. He placed another, smaller charge across it to cut off computer control as well as the early warning system. The valve charge would blow, and it would be well over an hour before anyone knew; by then the plant would be at the critical stage.
If that wasn’t enough, Abraham had taken precautions against manual interference as well. Besides the explosive charges, his tool satchel had held a 9-mm submachine gun complete with extended sixty-shot clip. Rigging it to fire upward — in the direction of the nearest access ladder — was no problem at all. Neither was affixing a motion sensor to its trigger mechanism. The device was no bigger than a small tape recorder and was nothing more than a sophisticated version of the one used on home security alarms. The final fail-safe element of his plan: Abraham had left the power plant confident in the knowledge that it would blow at the very instant he detonated the explosives beneath the president’s car.
His outfit, typical of a high steelworker, had helped him gain access to one of the elevators when no one had been paying much attention. He crouched now on a horizontal steel support beam halfway to the front of the structure, in clear view of the road below. He found this setting to be slightly ironic in that he had a lot in common with the steel shell. After all, that was what his entire existence had been reduced to in the Amazon. All the covering conscience and sensibility had been stripped away. What remained had been hardened into tungsten and rendered impenetrable.
Abraham rose to his feet and pulled off his helmet. He had not brought binoculars along, but he could see the motorcade making its way through the downtown Boston streets well off in the distance. He fingered the detonator through the fabric of his pocket and counted the minutes before the time would come to use it.
Money might not be everything, Patty Hunsecker reckoned, but it sure helped. It was money that had allowed her to hire a private Learjet to fly her across the country to the Utah Salt Flats the previous night. She could only hope to arrive at the bunker ahead of Sal Belamo and his killers, yet knew that hope had nothing to do with it. Blaine McCracken had let her go, which meant he was giving her time. Why, she could not say. His code of honor was a constant enigma. She hated him for some parts of it, loved him for others. She supposed she couldn’t blame him for what he had to do, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t try to save her father first.
She rented a helicopter at the airport where she had landed and asked the pilot to fly her over the flats, where she hastily reconstructed the bunker’s location in her mind. She had trouble with her bearings, was almost ready to give up, in fact, when a narrow one-story building appeared out of nowhere.
“What the hell?…”
“This is where I get off,” she told the pilot.
There should have been security. They should have been met along the perimeter and warned off. Patty feared that Belamo and his men had gotten here ahead of her after all, but that seemed impossible. No, something else was to blame, and she could not possibly say what.
A hefty bonus convinced the pilot to wait for her, and Patty entered the building through its single unlocked door. The inside was lined with counters and shelves, an outpost abandoned to the elements, complete with layers of dust. It took her a few minutes before she found the false door in the wall that led into a closetlike cubicle. It was dark and she fumbled for a light switch; a fluorescent came on and illuminated a simple control panel, a single arrow pointing up and another down.
Patty pressed the down one.
Instantly the elevator began its whirling descent. With speed impossible to judge, she had no way of telling how deeply she was descending into the bowels of the earth. Several seconds passed before the compartment ground to a halt and the single door slid open.
Before her was a long corridor, the white floors indistinguishable from the walls and ceiling of the same shade. The sudden brightness stung her eyes and it took them a few seconds to adjust. She started down the rounded hall with the clip-clop of her boot heels the only sound.
Where was everyone?
Perhaps the Children of the Black Rain had abandoned the bunker when the scope of their failure became known. It seemed logical. Return to the surface and disappear until another day dawned down the road in the future. After nearly a half century of waiting, surely the makers of the plan could wait a little longer. Video surveillance cameras dotted the hallway at regularly spaced intervals, but she could not tell if they were on or not.
Her heart was starting to sink. If her father wasn’t here, she would never see him again. And, yet, if she did find him, she had no idea what she would say. He was still her father; whatever else he was made him no less than that. But she knew she wasn’t doing this for him. She was doing it for herself. She had to know, had to understand, wanted to prove Blaine and the others wrong.
An open doorway beckoned her, the first she had seen so far. Stepping through it brought her into a sprawling meeting hall. A huge conference table was centered on the floor. One of the walls was dominated by a map of the United States showing a dozen glowing red lights. And set before that wall was a darkened figure facing her. Although the figure’s face was cloaked in shadows and half-light, she could still see he was an Oriental. He sat there immobile and expressionless, as if waiting for her to approach.
Patty recalled Takahashi’s story of how he was the only overseer of the Children of the Black Rain to survive the onslaught of an unknown militant in their midst. It was this militant who had so drastically changed the rules, opting to expand Japanese revenge into the deadly nuclear scenario. And she knew that this must be that man. He regarded her with inexplicable indifference as she approached him.
“Where’s my father?” she demanded, fighting to sound strong and fearless. “Where’s Phillip Hunsecker?”
The Japanese just stared at her. Patty stopped, then came closer.
“I want to see my father. I want to—” Patty froze when she was close enough to see why the figure was so silent, so still.