Fire came back up at her, automatic and single shot, describing beautiful emerald traces in her enhanced night vision. She stripped a hand grenade from her belt, while firing one-handed down the staircase, pulled the pin with her teeth – painfully cracking a filling as she did – and tossed the small bomb into the maelstrom below. She closed her eyes, backing away and firing blindly.
The grenade exploded with a roar, causing the spike of pain already drilling into her head to grow cruel thorns that raked at the back of her eyes and drove jagged spears deep into her brain stem.
Caitlin pitched over and vomited. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she grunted, struggling to regain her feet.
The volume of fire downstairs was deafening, drowned out only by the deep bass percussion of exploding grenades on the ground floor. The boards beneath her shook and shuddered so much she feared they might collapse. And still she couldn’t get up. Her head spun as though she’d stepped off a fairground ride, and she could not control her weapon anymore. Two figures appeared at the top of the stairs, one of them the squat, powerful outline of the man she called Dr Noo.
He raised his weapon at her, a FAMAS assault rifle, and cried, ‘Allahu Akbar!’ - just before his face exploded and he toppled backwards onto the man behind him.
‘Quick, come with me!’
A voice, coming from above her… It was unfamiliar, but unmistakably American.
‘Who the fuck…?’ She gagged and choked again on a mouthful of bile, toppling sideways as she tried to stand. ‘Can’t go,’ she protested. ‘My target.’
‘Leave him!’
The stranger, the man upstairs, leapt down beside her, stripped the MP5 from her grip and wrested a fresh magazine from the utility belt. He swapped out the mag in the dark without any trouble and moved over to the stairs to fire down on any approaching attackers. Three more grenades exploded in close succession and the uproar of automatic fire became unbearable.
Caitlin felt herself falling away into darkness.
50
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
No civilised man should ever be awake at this hour, thought Jed, as he waited in the darkened office for his last meeting of the night. Not unless he had a bottle of good champagne in one hand and a couple of exotic dancers in the other.
He stayed away from the window by habit now, but there wasn’t that much to see. The downtown city centre was in darkness, save for a few buildings running on generators, one of them his own hotel, a few blocks away to the south. The never-ending caucus would still be in session there, his delegates – he did think of them as his now – working the phones and counting heads as they attempted to stave off defeat in the morning’s vote.
But they would be defeated. Jed Culver had stolen enough votes in his time to know when the situation was hopeless. The Putsch were going to get their amendments up. They were going to turn the United States Government into something like a third-world junta. He shook his head at his own incompetence in not foreseeing this and aborting it at conception. But, looking back, he could understand. He’d been so focused on his own, much humbler agenda that he simply hadn’t been prepared for the depth of feeling, the visceral fear that had infected everything here in a way it hadn’t back in Hawaii. That was understandable. You couldn’t see the Wave in Hawaii; you didn’t live every minute with the prospect of it moving and just eating you alive. He should have factored that in.
‘There is a tide in the affairs of men,’ he muttered to himself, ‘which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune – but omitted, and all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.’
‘What’s that, Jed?’
Culver turned around to the doorway and was surprised to find a thin man standing there, silhouetted by the light of a small hand-held phone. Two larger companions, instantly recognisable as bodyguards, loomed a discreet distance behind him.
‘Just mangling the bard, Bill,’ the lawyer replied. ‘It always helps me when creeping murmur and the pouring dark fill the wide vessel of the universe.’
Bill shrugged. ‘Me, I like to read or play bridge. Golf’s pretty good too. But not at this time of night.’
‘No,’ agreed Culver, who hadn’t been expecting anyone like this. The others he’d met tonight had all been anonymous people. Quiet men and women. ‘So… er…’
The figure chuckled in the gloom. ‘I really threw you for a doozey, didn’t I? Coming here, I mean.’
‘Yes, you did,’ Culver admitted. ‘I was expecting someone… lower down the food chain.’
‘Someone expendable?’
‘If you like.’
The man walked into the room while his bodyguards remained in the corridor. ‘This is important, Jed,’ he said. ‘I have a lot invested in this venture. We all do. If it fails, we’re sunk. If it plays out, who knows, maybe people will remember us hundreds of years from now. Assuming there’s anybody left, of course.’
The lawyer shrugged. ‘People would remember you anyway, Bill.’
‘Not for something as cool as this, though, Jed. This is the sort of thing that ends up in oil paintings. Like Paul Revere’s ride. It’s that important.’
Culver couldn’t argue with that.
‘You did bring your phone, right?’ asked Bill.
Jed pulled it out of his suit pocket and handed it over. The man’s face was underlit by the glow of the screen as he keyed in a series of codes.
‘Okay,’ he said, as the smart phone beeped. ‘The network is active.’
‘And secure?’
‘And secure.’
Culver thanked him as he took the phone back. He opened the message window and pressed a few buttons.
And with that, a single hard-encrypted message beamed out across the city to hundreds of identical devices.
‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘It’s happening.’
Most of the delegates at the convention had succumbed to the lack of air-conditioning and removed their jackets; ties were loosened and, in some cases, dispensed with altogether. The atmosphere in the auditorium was sour, hot and rank, although partly that had to do with the split on the floor that was threatening to tear the whole process apart. James Kipper pressed his lips together in an effort to maintain his calm as some asshole from Spokane attempted to tell him how to do his job.
‘This isn’t how we would run things, let me tell you, Kipper. We’d have had this show wrapped up days ago, and there wouldn’t have been any of this school-camp bullshit with lights out and no air, either. How the hell do you expect people to make decisions under these conditions? It is impossible.’