Chapter 11

No man can escape his destiny; and he should next inquire how best he may live the time he has.

—Plato

 

Vice-President Carl J. Carlson smelled Death as soon as he boarded Eagle Two, and when he triggered his safety harness he felt his leather recliner become a coffin. The Vice-President smelled Death every time he flew, which, even this early in the campaign, was almost every day. Today it smelled sour, that moldy washrag sour of his childhood. His nose had its fill of Death just an hour ago, on the smoke-laden air that stuck to the remains of a Children of Eden compound in Tennessee. Death’s thick perfume clung to fire trucks, the blackened clothing of rescuers, to the breath of a glad-handing mayor.

He might be a politician, but he was no fool.

The fire couldn’t have been an accident, he thought. These bodies . . . somebody set them on fire and let them run.

FBI investigators thought so, too, but the local medical examiner claimed they had not had time enough to know what they were looking at. The examiner was a big shot in the Children of Eden, and it looked like all of the dead were Gardeners, mostly Innocents.

One hundred and twenty retarded kids, another eighty adults. Maybe twenty-five staff.

He shook his head to try to shake the memory of the pitiful remains of those children.

They called their compound “Revelation Ranch,” and someone had engineered a flash fire to burn them out.

The question was, did that someone kill them all first, with something chemical or biological, and then torch them as a cover? And what’s the immediate health threat to the neighborhood?

“Clever bit of engineering, eh?” asked Perkins, the obnoxious Toronto reporter. “Torching people without really doing too much damage to the structures?”

“Perkins,” Carl Carlson said, “maybe up in Toronto you’re accustomed to this sort of thing. Down here when somebody kills two hundred-plus people to make a point we take it seriously. They are not ‘clever engineers,’ they’re bastards, pure and simple.”

Perkins held up his Sidekick, its “send” light blinking.

“You’re on record, Mr. Vice-President.”

“Then strike ‘bastards.’ Make it ‘dickheads.’”

The Vice-President had flown halfway across the continent twice in one morning, and now he was off again without even the chance to kiss his wife.

“Don’t look so glum, Carl,” Mark O’Connor said. “The best is yet to come.”

Mark O’Connor was husband to President Claudia Kay O’Connor, and “The Best Is Yet To Come!” was the Knuckleheads tune that they sang for Carl that hot night at the convention when his name went up in lights. His name shimmered across the ceiling of the convention center, under the name “Claudia Kay O’Connor.” The party had duped him into thinking he’d be their Number-One Guy, then trapped him into playing life insurance for the first woman President of the United States.

“It was an obscene song,” he said. “We’ve been living it down ever since.”

“That was three years ago,” Mark said. “You’ve got those going-into-the-last-round campaign jitters, that’s all.”

He pulled an EdenSprings water from the refrigerator and offered one to Carl, who declined. Then he sat in his accustomed seat next to the Vice-President and triggered his harness just in time for the big push down the runway.

“Helps the ear-popping,” Mark said, taking a swallow. “My ears are taking a beating from all this flying.” He tipped back another swallow.

“You could talk your wife into taking her own team on the road for a while,” Carl said. “Her exposure always spikes the polls.”

“I hope that pun was unintentional,” Mark said. “And we’re keeping her under wraps as long as possible. That’s a security thing, and it was my call and I’m sticking . . .”

Mark’s left hand went to his ear, and he finished off his mineral water in three big gulps. His expression was one of intense concentration.

“You okay?” Carl asked.

Mark O’Connor pointed to his ear, made the “okay” sign, and continued to listen to whatever his Sidekick was telling him.

“You’ve been drinking so much of that goddamn water lately I thought . . . “

“Thank you, Jeff,” O’Connor said, “I’ll tell him.”

“Jeff Wheeler?” Carl asked.

Mark nodded.

“Jesus! What kind of disaster does he have for us now?”

The plane leveled off, and O’Connor got himself another bottle of water. He leaned over Carl in that way he had that made the Secret Service nervous.

“You won’t believe this,” Mark said. “Another Gardener compound torched, this one in Arkansas. A hundred and twenty dead. Somebody’s pissed at somebody.”

“We better have something for the sharks,” Carl said, nodding across the aisle.

Several Sidekicks sounded their tones among the journalists. The news was already on the wire, and O’Connor’s people didn’t have a statement for him yet. That was pretty goddamn sloppy interference they were playing. They’d better have something to say about it pretty damned quick.

As though reading his mind, Mark O’Connor handed him a slick, with big print, yet. The boys across the aisle started his way, but Carl waved them off while he read what the White House wanted him to say about this epidemic of fire.

The Vice-President never got the chance to read his opinion on the Gardener deaths, and no one had the chance to ask him about it, either.

As the traveling team closed in for their questions and a statement, Carl noticed that Mark O’Connor smelled like Death. Mark hovered, slack-jawed, over Carl’s seat and the man’s breath smelled like goddam Death, and this wasn’t just the Vice-President’s usual in-flight death fantasy. This sour washrag was real.

Carl’s first thought, even to himself, was a wisecrack: Jeez, no wonder his old lady keeps us on the road!

Mark shut his mouth, got a quizzical look on his face, then began scratching both his forearms.

“Mark?” Carl asked.

Agent Lampard, from Claudia’s team, reached out to steady Mark O’Connor, who slumped against the bulkhead and slid onto the carpet. His body settled like hot jelly in its clothes.

Two sets of hands grabbed Carl by the shoulders and pulled him back as he saw O’ Connor’s face melt from his skull. Steam puffed out of his bulging shirt-front, and then little blue flames danced on the dark liquid that leaked from the splits in his skin. Agent Lampard grabbed a fire extinguisher.

Everything moved in underwater time for the Vice-President.

“Get him out of here!” Lampard yelled, and pushed Carl back with a shove to the chest. Then he triggered the distress call on his Sidekick.

By this time, Mark O’Connor was just a smear of greasy black smoke overlaying an intense blue flame that Lampard sprayed with a pitiful little fire extinguisher. The other two agents pulled the Vice-President through the hatch to the cockpit, and Carl’s last glimpse into the passenger compartment showed Lampard and the Toronto reporter, Perkins, flailing at O’Connor’s burning body with their coats. By the time the cockpit hatch was locked behind them, Carl and the others were gagging from the stench.

Alarms buzzed on the cockpit console, and Agent Carver gasped, “Fire in the passenger compartment.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” the copilot muttered.

“Activating fire suppression,” the pilot said.

The pilot flipped a pair of toggles but the alarm persisted. The graphic on his screen showed the fire halfway up the aisle and already through the main deck. Fists pounded weakly at the locked cockpit door, and Agent Brown stopped Carl’s hand on its way to the latch.

“National Control,” the pilot said, “this is Eagle Two declaring an emergency. We have fire in the aft cabin.”

The Vice-President’s mind buzzed, and he realized he was hyperventilating. He cupped his hands around his mouth and concentrated on calming down.

These guys are good, he thought. They’ll get us down okay,

“Roger that emergency, Eagle Two. We are waving off traffic and you are clear to come around and land on Three.”

“Coming around,” the pilot said, and began a hard, banking turn.

I’m never going to be President, Carl thought.

Then he felt himself flush with anger because first his party and then fate had cheated him of his lifelong goal.

So close. So goddamn close!

The anger that outwashed his fear felt good, made Carl feel like they might fight their way through this one, after all. Amid the flurried activity of the crowded cockpit, Carl couldn’t help seeing O’Connor’s face slumping from its bones.

“I’m losing hydraulics,” the pilot said. “I’ve lost port flaps.”

“He just burned up,” Carl heard himself saying. “He just . . . burned up!”

Then the plane shuddered, dropped suddenly, shuddered again and more alarms buzzed across the control panel.

“No port side landing gear, no nose gear,” the pilot said. Carl wished he could bring up the kind of calm that he heard in the pilot’s voice. The plane began to waggle and slew, and Brown pushed him down onto the deck and piled on top of him. He covered his head with his arms, felt Brown’s assault Colt grind into his left shoulder blade and heard Carver on top of Brown whisper a prayer under his breath.

The plane almost straightened out, but by then the hot, stinking fire was at the cabin door, centimeters from his head. Then their wingtip caught the taxiway and the pilot hollered, “Shit!”

Through the tremendous tearing of metal and tumble of bodies around him, the last thing the Vice-President heard was Brown’s desperate whisper at his ear: “God, please take care of my babies.”