20

One hundred kilotons. Small. Big enough.

Close your eyes. Fear the light. Hold your breath.

Maelstrom came. Sucked her down again.

The seconds before.

Korda was numb. His right hand was still holding a drink, but he couldn’t feel his fingers. His brain was neither sending messages to, nor receiving them from, his body. People were shouting things at him. He couldn’t hear them. The rising nightmare blocked their voices. It had uncurled in his stomach when the woman had arrived. Intuition fed by a recurring dream he couldn’t quite remember froze him. He did nothing but watch. He couldn’t speak. He watched Chapel walk away. He watched the man make his way across the lawn, then begin to run towards the docks. He saw the woman follow him. He didn’t see the president. And then the shouting began.

And the nightmare came for him. The killing light flashed. Time gave him an eternal last moment of full knowledge.

The van became the sun. The air became bright fire. It expanded, spreading millions of degrees millisecond by millisecond. It announced its Armageddon presence with three horsemen: radiation, heat and blast. Reed’s home vaporized. Beyond, in the town, the dragon didn’t kill as cleanly. The heat was no longer enough to disintegrate. Now it killed with pain. Buildings and trees flashed into flame. The blast knocked them into hurricane shrapnel. Bodies burned and smashed into shattered walls. The dragon scoured the earth with its claws. It ate Petersfield. Millisecond by millisecond.

Down. Stay down. She tried to dive. She tried to flee the dragon. But the waves raised her up and she saw the fireball. Huge. Perfect. The icon of absolute art. She was several miles away, safe from the dragon breath, but she felt its blessing as a wave of heat on her forehead. She tasted lead. And there was the sound. It was thunder that filled the world and filled her head. It surrounded her, pushed out on her skull and squeezed her tight. There were no other sounds left in the universe. This one sound was too big. She opened her mouth wide. She couldn’t scream, but she wanted to let the thunder out before it killed her.

Chapel sat in the stern of the boat. He watched his act of enormity. The bay here was untouched. Night surrounded him. But in the distance, it was day, then sunset as the heat of the fireball faded. The mushroom cloud rose. That is what history looks like, he thought. That is its shape.

He had given it this form. He didn’t feel horror. He had already worked through that. He had already embraced the scope of his crime. What he felt instead was the orgasm rush of omnipotence.

The blast dissipated. The heat calmed. The dragon lost its energy. Half a mile from its birth, it killed the last of its initial victims. But its legacy sank into the ground. It rode the air as the cloud began to disperse, spreading its poison dust downwind. The sound went on, too. It changed, though. The thunder faded. The sound transmuted as eyes and camera lenses saw what had happened and the knowledge spread. It took only minutes for the sound to become the scream of an entire nation.

They heard the scream. Everyone did. In Washington, Flanagan and Luzhkov had hit a bar a few minutes away from the Watergate. The big-screen TV in the corner had been silently playing a Lakers game. Then it was showing a mushroom cloud. At first Flanagan thought he was seeing an ad. Then copy began crawling across the bottom of the screen. Silence in the room. A man in a business suit five years too small for his waistline stood up, shaking, and turned the sound up. The noise of the scream filled the lounge. Flanagan turned to Luzhkov, saw the man mirror his own loss and panic.

They made land at Hither Hills State Park. Quintero was waiting there with the rest of the fleet: two more fishing boats. One of them was held together by rust. They were both last-word inconspicuous. “Did you see the show?” Chapel asked, as he hopped aboard the more seaworthy of the two vessels.

Quintero clapped slowly.

Chapel felt his face shape a grim smile. “So we’re off to the races.”

“And what now?”

“Back to Fort Benning.”

“Is that wise?”

“Turn a radio on. We’ll know definitely before we get there. But yes, that’s where we should be. I have to be where I can be reached, after all. I’m going to be needed.”

“Nothing went wrong, then.”

“No. One thing I need checked out, though.” He called across to Maldonado on the other fishing boat. “Head back to where the decoy ship was.”

Maldonado stared. “What? Why?” The two men standing beside him didn’t look happy, either.

“Scan the bay. If there’s a survivor, kill her.”

“Go look yourself, mamagüebo.”

“Don’t worry, it’s safe. The boat was far enough away from the blast, wind’s blowing the other way. No radiation.”

“I don’t see you heading there.”

“I didn’t see you at ground zero. I might have to be in front of cameras within the next couple of hours. I can’t be futzing around in the bay. Nobody’s going to look twice at you. Now quit jerking me off and go.”

Maldonado glanced at Quintero. The general shrugged. Maldonado muttered something about Chapel’s mother.

Wreckage floated past her. It had been part of the boat’s gunwale. Blaylock grabbed it. She climbed on top, resting her torso on the flat surface. Experimentally, she stopped kicking her legs. The planking was big enough to support her weight. She thought about striking for shore. She couldn’t start her legs again. They had turned into lead. They hung down in the water, useless as pillars. Exhaustion pressed her to the wood, turned her into flotsam. She drifted. She didn’t think. She dozed. The water slowly leeched her warmth. Defeat weighed her down, tried to pull her under.

A sound made her snap to. It was the distant roar of a boat’s engine. She raised her head. She saw lights heading her way. She looked around, oriented herself from the glow of Petersfield’s flames. The boat was coming from the same direction Chapel had gone. Didn’t necessarily mean anything. As the boat drew nearer, she saw that it was using a searchlight on the water. Why? she wondered. No reason to look for survivors in the water. The disaster was on land. There were good reasons, though. And they were bad for her.

War returned. It poured some warmth back into her limbs. She let herself slide down the wreckage, lowered herself into the water, hung on with one hand. She waited. The boat’s light swung in erratic half-circles, insect-searching. It passed over the wood, came back and stayed. She let go, began treading water gently, keeping just the top of her head and eyes above water. There was a shift in the quality of the engine noise as the boat changed direction and slowed down. It came closer. Blaylock went under and swam toward the noise. The underwater night lit up as the light passed over her and moved on. She surfaced portside aft. She hugged close to the boat, looked for a gift. She saw the silhouettes of three men on board. One of them was leaning down, peering at her wreckage. He shook his head. “Nada,” he said.

As the engine began to rev up again, Blaylock saw her gift. The boat’s fishing camouflage was complete, and a net hung down over one corner of the stern. She hooked her left arm through it. The boat sped up, took her for a ride.

The nation screamed. It howled. The world echoed as the sound spread over the globe. The nation, screaming, stretched out its arms, pleading (and screaming) for a leader. Within an hour of the blast, the death of the president was known, and the rules of succession suddenly were headline-important as the full meaning of the death of the Speaker of the House hit home. The Secret Service beat the cameras to the president pro tempore of the Senate by less than five minutes. Daniel Hallam was found in his office. He was pale, but spoke calmly. The Service wanted to spirit him away to Cheyenne Mountain. Hallam refused. The last thing the country needed was an invisible president.

And so Senator Daniel Hallam emerged from the Capitol, stood on its steps, faced the cameras. He’d had the time it took to walk from his office to here to think about what he was going to say. He opened his mouth and spoke for the first time as president to a traumatized nation. His speech began with “My fellow Americans,” as all such speeches must. He was aware of the cliché. He didn’t fight it, not when it was a simple truth. The simple truth was what he kept to. “I am as shocked as you are by today’s events. I’m not going to stand here and tell you comforting lies. I will tell you something you already know: that it is when we are tested in this way that we learn our true character as a nation. I will also tell you that we will get aid to those who need it. And we will find and punish those responsible for this unfathomable crime. Do we know who those people are? No. Not yet. And I cannot emphasize too strongly that we cannot, now of all times, afford to jump to easy, wrong conclusions. We know, to our cost, the consequences of hasty decisions. Rest assured that it is fact, not rumour, that will guide our hand.” He paused. Did he have to descend to the expected bromides of “strength,” “hope,” “faith,” and “God”? He supposed he did. However meaningless, the words were the sound of reassurance, and could do no harm. So he did what he could for his wounded, screaming nation.

They had a laptop set up in the barracks. It was streaming the speech. Chapel stared. Then he was calling Felix Jurado. He tried to ignore the look Quintero was giving him. “Pratella,” Chapel sputtered to Jurado. “What the fuck?”

World-weary patience and despair in Jurado’s tone. “I tried to call you.”

“I was busy. What happened?”

“He was poisoned. With chlordane.”

“The hell is that?”

“A pesticide,” Jurado said. “Loves the fatty acids. Clogs up the heart, lungs, brain and spinal cord. Causes convulsions, miscellaneous other fun things, and death. Doesn’t take much. His hands were coated with it, like he was using it for soap. Only took a couple of hours to identify it.”

“I doubt he committed suicide. Where did it come from?”

A grunt from Jurado. It was the laugh of the completely pissed-off. “God knows. There’s no trace of it anywhere in his office except on him.”

“The dumb bastard had to get it from somewhere.”

“So tell him.”

Chapel closed his eyes. “Talk to you later,” he said, and hung up. He could see the rabbit holes that were going to swallow up the investigation. It was a classic, freaky, locked-door murder case plus political assassination. The leaks would come, and the conspiracy theories would mushroom. Some of those theories might work in his favour. At the end of the day, though, he didn’t care how Pratella was murdered. He cared a lot about who killed him. The move was a perfect counter to his agenda. It might as well bear a signature. But the woman was dead. He’d killed her at least three times tonight. She was radioactive dust over the Hamptons or a floater in the Atlantic. She was dead.

Dead, but still screwing with him. He threw the phone at the computer screen, smashing it. Quintero said, “We just detonated a nuclear weapon for nothing, didn’t we?”

“No.” Chapel turned the muttered word into a heartbeat of rage and desperate urgency. “No, no, no, no, no, no.” He heard in Hallam’s cautious statement a repudiation not only of the rumour he had planted, but of American strength. The new president was the embodiment of every weakness he had struggled so hard, sacrificed so much, to save his country from. Save the nation he would. He still had a card to play. “No,” he said again, this time out loud, firm, and to Quintero. “We didn’t do it for nothing.”

“Really.” Skeptical.

“Really. And guess what? You’re going to save us all.”

Heavy drinking in the lounge. Flanagan and Luzhkov found a table at the far end of the room away from the TV. Vandelaare joined them. The two mercs were playing it stoic. Flanagan wasn’t buying. He saw Vandelaare biting his lip. There was a muscle in Luzhkov’s cheek that kept moving, as if he were chewing something, or biting back a roar. They were hurting. They had begun, he suspected, to believe in a dream of usefulness and bloody redemption. Waking up was nasty. Luzhkov seemed to be taking it hardest. When he wasn’t pounding back vodka shots, his left hand was rubbing the white-knuckled fist of his right. Perhaps his dream had been the most vivid.

Flanagan’s throat had constricted around a steel burr of grief. He was feeling the same disconnections from light and hope he had experienced when his sister died. There was also the impotence, a raging, acid-spewing, hate-defining impotence. This was worse than when Holly had been killed. Back then, he had always known he was powerless. Trying to avenge her death had been his first stab at any kind of genuine action. But with Blaylock, being swept up in her war, he had tasted agency. He was running InSec now. There was enormous power there. Only there wasn’t. Without Blaylock, he was the hollow shell of a rotted figurehead. He had no direction. He didn’t know what to do.

“So what now?” Vandelaare asked, eyes focused on nothing. The question was rhetorical. Flanagan felt it was aimed at him, though. What now? What now? He didn’t know.

Luzhkov was frowning, as if trying to give Vandelaare a real answer.

Flanagan felt panic flare through the grief, pierce the anger. He was about to lose something else.

Do something.

The boat must have been slowing. Its wake was dropping. The net dug into her armpit, doing its best to amputate. She felt heavier than an anchor. She half-wondered why she didn’t drag the ship down. She had almost blacked out several times during the ride. Each time, she had managed to shake off unconsciousness. Each time, her reserves of adrenaline had dwindled. War threatened to succumb to a killing peace.

Slower yet. She blinked the fog from her brain. The engine noise dropped enough that she could make out snippets of Spanish conversation above her. A man laughed. She wanted to eat his throat. She twisted around to face the direction the boat was heading. She saw a darker mass in the night. They were close to land. The engine went from growl to mutter. It was time to move. Her arm was dead. Her brain sent it signals. The arm didn’t want to know. She couldn’t tell its circulation numbness from the hypothermic chill in the rest of her body. She looked at it, ordered it to move. She heaved with her shoulder. A constellation of incandescent needles stabbed into her arm. The pain was so ludicrous she had to stifle laughter. Her arm shifted an inch. She strained again. This time, she had to choke back a scream. She pulled herself far enough out of the net for gravity to take over. She slid free. The boat left her behind. Swimming was hard with one arm immobilized. It was even harder not to thrash. She made the arm move. It howled at her. Its gestures were wooden. She kept going under. The flexibility gradually returned. She was able to move forward, barely. Exhaustion and cold made her a crippled frog. Just ahead, she saw the boat’s lights illuminate an old pier. She reached the far end as the men finished tying up the vessel and shut it down. She hugged a piling and listened. More snatches of conversation drifted her way. All in Spanish. She heard an English word: “Benning.”

She swam under the pier, closer. Two of the men were walking away. The third was still fiddling with the boat. She poked her head out long enough to catch a glimpse of him, in silhouette, rubbing a cloth over a railing. Wiping down the fingerprints. His companions disappeared into the woods. She heard a car start. She had a few minutes alone with this man. The impulse, the desire: rise up and Scylla-snatch the man, squeeze him for knowledge, then squeeze him for blood. The reality: she couldn’t take on a preschooler in her state. Even if she could, taking the man down would be a mistake. A missing man would be a red flag for Chapel. Right now, for the second time, he would consider her dead. That was a better edge than one man could give her.

After ten minutes, the cleanup was done. The man left. Another car engine fired up. She waited another quarter of an hour, fighting sleep. No one else showed. Blaylock crawled up on the shore. She dragged herself into the underbrush, out of sight. And that was it. She didn’t have any more. She curled up in ball. Shivering, teeth chattering, she slept.