The two men went through airport security in Reno with great ease. Neither carried any luggage. They didn’t even wear jackets. They slipped off their black loafers and put them through the x-ray scanner while everyone around them struggled with coats, satchels, purses, laptops, briefcases, strollers, umbrellas. The two men didn’t even carry wallets. The only things they had to take out of their pockets were keys and money clips. They slipped past their fellow travellers and cleared security quickly, not having to pause to reassemble themselves.
They strolled down the concourse, one tall and thin, with blond hair buzzed close to his skull, the other shorter, bulkier, and dark, with a strong nose and even stronger brown eyes. He did the looking around while his companion just strolled. They stopped at a bar, leaning back against high stools. One ordered a Tecate, the other a Coke. When the boy brought the order he offered glasses, but neither man bothered. The blond one took a long drink of the Tecate, then frowned at his companion’s drink. “Coke?”
The dark man said, “I don’t like to waste good beer,” and he poured his drink into a conveniently placed potted palm. His companion did the same with his beer. Then, as if having a contest, each crushed his can on the tabletop by pressing down with one hand. The cans collapsed into flattened pieces of metal. Each man tore the result in half, creating a sharp edge, then sharpened it further with a key that was a disguised file. Finally, the blond man took his keyring in his palm, and stuck three keys out from between his fingers, turning his hand into a mace. In his other hand he carried the sharpened piece of can.
Now they were armed—and they felt very secure in the airport concourse in assuming they were the only people who were. “I love security,” the blond one said as they walked up toward the passenger gates.
The passenger lounge area around Gate 32 was fairly full. The two men stopped and looked over their possibilities. Several businessmen traveling separately: good possibilities. Three or four family groups they tentatively dismissed. Two thin, leggy women putting their heads together over a magazine. The blond man watched them appreciatively, until his partner nudged his arm.
There was another group of kids in their twenties at whom the men stared closely. Then a young mother with a toddler, who kept running across everyone’s legs. Geeky kid with an earplug, playing what looked like a Gameboy on steroids. Middle-aged man and teenage daughter, maybe on a college trip. The dark man looked at the father more closely: take away the girl and he could be the one, their target. Two flight attendants stretching their legs, chatting quietly to each other. Don’t turn your back on them: wouldn’t be the first time a flight attendant turned out to be a trained killer.
They concentrated first on the people facing them, assuming the ones who were careless enough to sit with their backs to the traffic were harmless.
Jack, the “kid” playing a game on his hand-held device, wondered who the two were. They obviously didn’t realize he could see them in two reflections: the glass wall in front of him and the television screen in the other lounge. The two men moved purposefully through the small crowd, obviously looking for someone. Jack appeared to continue playing his game. His cane leaned against the chair beside him. Security hadn’t liked that cane, but Jack had walked in with an obvious limp and the x-ray machine hadn’t shown anything inside the wooden stick, so they’d let it through.
Jack remained aware of the two men without ever looking directly at them, until they were standing over him. He felt their presence, heard their breathing, and sighed without making a sound. Jack turned off his game so he could see the two in the reflection of the small screen. Whatever happened, he wasn’t moving. He felt safe surrounded by people. Until he saw the points of the keys sticking out from between the taller one’s fingers. That hand was about a foot behind his neck.
Jack had some skills, but he was no martial artist. His superpower was networking. He had latched on to Chun Lee in Malaysia at just the right time, but here no one was available, there wasn’t time, and he seriously doubted he could make friends with either of the assassins standing behind him.
Quickly he ticked off escapes. The gate, “guarded” by a ticket taker, but if Jack leaped down that tunnel he would find himself trapped in an airplane. Farther away there was a door that would let him out into the runway area, but these two guys, especially the taller one, looked faster than he was. They wouldn’t let him get that far. The same was true of the path back down the concourse.
Couldn’t go around them, then. That left one possibility.
The taller one, the one with the keys in his fist, leaned over as if to speak to him quietly. Jack didn’t believe that, though. Those keys were about to come into the back of his neck, with paralyzing force. The hand was moving down.
Jack stood and turned quickly, then lost his balance without his cane and fell forward. His hand came down on the thinner man’s hand, pushing it down into the seat back. The keyring as a weapon was turned on its wielder, crushing his palm inside the closed fist. The man grimaced, he was tough.
Jack gave one more hard press on the hand as he regained his balance. “Sorry,” he mumbled. The taller man stepped back, shaking his hand. The other one, with a roll of his eyes, stepped forward. “Sir—” he began, as if about to deliver a confidential message. Jack leaned toward him attentively, noticing the glint of metal in the man’s hand.
The two planned to kill him right here in this passenger lounge! How did they hope to get away with such a thing? Possibilities ran through his mind—maybe it was a suicide mission, maybe they had no identities—which was a distraction, but he couldn’t help it. That was how his mind worked, even as he put on a dopey expression for the benefit of the burly man.
As their heads leaned toward each other, as the man’s hand holding the sharpened metal came up, toward his intended victim’s throat, the cane came up too, Jack raising it as if it were part of him. It blocked the man’s thrust then the head of the cane rose into the man’s throat, left unprotected as he leaned forward.
“Unngh,” he grunted. Jack twisted the head of the cane, trying to crush his windpipe. But the man reached for the cane, and Jack knew he couldn’t afford to lose his only weapon. He yanked it back and stepped away.
The burly man was choking. A woman hurried up and began tending to him, her head leaning close to his, but her ministrations didn’t help. The burly man went down on one knee, then slumped to the ground.
A couple of people in the lounge watched the little drama, but most paid no attention. More people were watching the adorable blond toddler running up and down the rows. Several would have liked for him to shut up, but nobody said so, and several others smiled at him with genuine affection. Every parent in the lounge was reminded of what they had left at home.
The blond man was recovered now. He glared at Jack, whose only defense was to back up. The toddler bumped his legs, then cruised around him. The blond man closed in. He had dropped his keys, but a glint of metal remained in his right hand.
The woman who had been trying to help the other one leaned against the row of chairs, which knocked a paper cup off its small table between two chairs on Jack’s side of the row. It spilled its contents, ice and soda, just as the blond man stepped forward. His foot came down on a piece of ice and he lurched. He didn’t fall, he had good balance, but in trying to regain it his arm flailed. There was a sharp smack and the toddler, his cheek reddened, began screaming.
“Why did you do that?” the outraged woman shouted. The child continued to cry, his mother swooped toward him, the blond man started to explain or apologize, and the woman cried, “Don’t you dare hit him again!”
Most of the women in the lounge and several men descended on him as one raging parent-beast. In moments it was impossible to tell where the blond man left off and the outraged crowd began. His head bobbed for a moment atop the sea of angry adults. Apparently he was trying to explain that he hadn’t done anything, but no one was listening. Someone had just found what he had in his hand.
“My God, he was going to slice him!”
“Get him! Make him drop it!”
A woman’s voice shrilled, “He was with him,” and part of the crowd turned its attention to the burly dark man. Once he was found to be armed as well, his conviction was complete.
Jack stood staring. The scene had turned to chaos in an instant, but a chaos unexpectedly beneficial to him. Then a hand grabbed his arm.
The woman who’d spilled the drink and accused the blond man tugged at him. Jack saw that she was Arden. How had he not recognized her? She wasn’t in disguise, exactly, just a hat with her hair pulled up under it, and large glasses.
Neither of them said a word as she pulled him toward the ramp back up the terminal. There they turned to look back. Airport cops had arrived to begin sorting out the scene, and had Jack’s attackers firmly grasped. The attackers looked, if anything, relieved.
“I had those two from the time they cleared security,” Jack said.
“Sure you did.”
“I would have left them—”
“This is better,” Arden assured him.
“This—” Jack looked back at the scene in the lounge, where a dozen pointed fingers accused the two of various crimes, and obviously no one remembered that Jack had been involved, or even existed—has aspects of greatness, Jack finished his sentence in his mind.
“Thank you.”
“Stop that.” He had meant to finish his sentence, “is better.” But she had answered his thought.
She put her arm through his. They could stroll out now. “In answer to your next question,” Arden said, “Granny sent me to take care of you.”
“‘Granny’?”
“Please don’t tell me you don’t know that my grandmother, who brought me into this group, is Gladys Leaphorn, the Chair. I will lose all faith in your info-gathering—”
“All right, yes, I knew that. Although there’s a lot I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone—”
“We have to go see her. Now.”
“Now?”
“That was the second part of my assignment. I’m to bring you to her. Come.”
“Why? I’m not going anywhere until I get some answers.”
Arden glanced back. “We’ll take my car.”
They met Gladys Leaphorn in the painted desert, at the base of a mesa that protected their flank, a spot from which they could see miles in every other direction. Arden’s car, a baby blue Cadillac from the early 70s, looked anachronistic in that setting, but not as much as one might have expected. The Chair emerged from a small stone shelter, walking shakily on two arm-canes. There was no sign of another car, nor tracks of any kind other than Arden’s. Quite possibly Gladys Leaphorn had flown here under her own power. She had no entourage, not even one aide. The lines in her face looked as deeply etched as the cracks in this dry earth. But she seemed to draw strength from this landscape, standing straighter as Jack and Arden approached. One of her metal canes dropped to the ground as she hugged her granddaughter.
“Thank you, baby. Was he in trouble?”
“Just like you thought, Granny. But we got by.”
“I could have handled it,” Jack said.
“That is not the point,” the Chair said. “Who is trying to kill you, Jack, and why?”
He looked her in the eyes and neither of them spoke for several seconds. Gladys Leaphorn’s dark eyes gave him nothing but his own reflection. Of course Jack had been thinking of little else except the question she had asked. His suspicions ranged wide, and covered the Chair herself. She had saved him from this latest attack. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t plotted it herself, either for real or to take him into her confidence. Her mind was so twisty there was no way to follow its trails.
The way Arden had rescued him—if in fact she had—had left Jack no chance of questioning his attackers. This had occurred to him some miles back.
He turned to her. “When did you spot those two? If you had let me know you were there, we could have worked together, maybe gotten at least one of them alone and still capable of talking. Now—”
“That’s the way these assassins work, Jack.” Gladys answered the question. “Their attacks are in public or near-public. Either they succeed or they are taken into custody by authorities who don’t know the right questions to ask. That was true of the two who attacked you in Malaysia, too, wasn’t it?”
Jack had to admit that was true.
“Who are dead, by the way,” Gladys added. “We made inquiries. They were ‘arrested’ at the convention center, but somehow never made it to jail.”
While Jack pondered that, the Chair continued to study him. Arden stood a couple of feet from each of them, forming the third point of a triangle. Her arms folded, she kept her eyes mostly on her grandmother. She was more subdued in her ancestor’s presence, but had an avid look on her face, studying all the time. “Tell him the rest of that story,” she said.
“They were already dead when they attacked you, Jack.”
His eyebrows flew up. The Chair continued, “They had been poisoned. Whether they succeeded or not, they had not long to live.”
So the killer of killers was more ruthless than those he, or they, employed.
The Chair dismissed that subject. “But you’re available for questioning, Jack. And I have some for you. What were you doing in Prague?”
“Three days before you arrived in Paris.”
Jack was shaking his head. “I haven’t been in Prague in four years.”
“You were seen there, Jack. By one of ours.”
Gladys Leaphorn’s voice was accusing. But Jack only listened thoughtfully, as if being handed a small puzzle. “DNA? Retinal scan? Are you saying it was just someone who looked like me?”
“You know you wouldn’t have left identifying marks. What about London? Why were you there?”
“This was supposedly—?”
“The same time frame. You were spotted entering an apartment in Chelsea.”
This time Jack’s eyes narrowed. “Where exactly?”
Gladys gave him an address. It was impossible to tell from Jack’s lack of reaction whether the address meant anything to him. Arden still stood in the same pose, her eyes going back and forth between the other two, but primarily staying on Jack. He was thinking, obviously, but didn’t seem to be trying to come up with an excuse.
“The only thing I did in London on this trip was change planes. I never left Heathrow. I was there for maybe two hours.”
The Chair’s voice remained level but relentless. “Then you would have arrived in France three days earlier than you did.”
“No one knows when I arrived in France. I travelled overland, I didn’t leave a paper trail.”
“Did you see anyone on your journey?”
“Ali Khatam. I wanted to get a feel for what the Kurds may be—”
“Ali Khatam’s son would be dead if not for you. He would say whatever you ask.”
Jack stared into her eyes and spoke flatly. “Why don’t you shoot him with truth serum and then ask him, Granny?” He let her look into his eyes for a long few seconds, then added, “Of what exactly am I being accused?”
Gladys sighed. “Of nothing, Jack. Honestly. But you’ve been going off on your own, acting unilaterally, and now someone is trying to kill you. What kind of mission—?”
“I did what I set out to do,” Jack interrupted. “And you and everyone else knows what it was. I’m done with that now.”
The sun would be setting soon, out in that western distance that appeared strangely intimate here. A breeze had sprung up, caressing their faces, its sandy touch tangible. Arden’s hair lifted and settled again. The Cadillac already had sand six inches up its tires. It would not take long here for man and any of his creations to disappear.
Gladys Leaphorn was no longer interrogating him. She had known Jack for half his life, though she had never remotely been a surrogate grandparent for him. They had their roles, and had respected each other since Jack was fourteen. Gladys stared off across the desert. It was possible that her old eyes saw something coming that neither of the young people could know.
“You know the other possibility,” Gladys said quietly.
Jack nodded. “Someone wanted you to believe I was in these places. They wanted to cast suspicion on me. Rather clumsily, may I say. If I wanted to go unnoticed in Prague I could. And that Chelsea address is one I know well, as you know. I wouldn’t go near it, not any more.”
Gladys’s long eyelashes softened her eyes as she blinked slowly. “That seemed like a strong possibility. Someone wanted you portrayed. Which means that maybe your attackers—”
“—were trying to steal my identity rather than kill me. Or kill me and have someone take my place. But I have no idea why.”
Abruptly the interview was over. Gladys stepped away, moving stiffly with her one arm cane. Arden had picked up the other but didn’t hand it to her. Jack spoke to the Chair’s back. “How do you know they didn’t succeed in replacing me?”
Gladys turned, smiling, and patted his cheek. “If the day comes that I don’t know you, Jack, it will be time to retire. I only hope it’s me these schemers try to fool with a double.”
Twilight had taken the mountains in the distance, turned them into grounded thunderheads. All three stared at the beauty of the darkening desert for a long few minutes. Just as they turned away, Gladys stiffened and said, “What was that?”
“What was what?” Jack asked, but Arden had obviously seen or felt it too. She and her grandmother were staring at the western horizon. “It came and went too fast,” Arden whispered. “Like a flaw in the retina, a peripheral hallucination. But if you saw it too—”
“I’m not sure saw is the right word. It was too fast.”
Nothing more happened, at least not in that part of America. In a few minutes they got into Arden’s car, the Chair in the backseat. After they’d driven a mile, she leaned forward and put her hand on Jack’s shoulder. She had never been motherly toward him. Her touch startled him.
“Stay close for a while, would you, Jack?”
Her voice was a strong combination of commanding, cajoling, and humbly requesting. There was no telling how many people it had swayed over the decades.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
The rest of that evening was a very busy one across America. It started out tranquilly, most of the country enjoying pleasant fall weather. That’s why so many people were outdoors, taking walks, sitting on porches, camping out. The adventurous were the unluckiest ones.
In a mobile home park outside Hot Springs, Arkansas, Len and Mabel Dawes had just tied down for the night. They were on their way south, slowly, from their home in Detroit. This was the first season of their retirement, Mabel from General Motors as an administrative assistant, Jack from the military and civil service. Their three retirements left them very comfortable at the ages of 66 and 68, respectively. They had children and grandchildren scattered around the country, and Detroit had seemed less and less like home the last few years. So they had sold the house, chucked the jobs, and become hobos, as Len put it. Mabel preferred “gypsies.” Hitting the road, they both felt younger by decades, starting over. They held hands half the way south.
Their tie-down slot featured a tiny patch of green grass, where they sat on folding chairs with drinks in their hands. In a few minutes they might grill something, or decide to drive into town for dinner. They suddenly grinned at each other, realizing their freedom from schedules for the first time in their lives. They had been married forty-three years and felt like newlyweds.
The sky was a strange mix of vibrant blue left over from the day, gray creeping in from the east, a few dark clouds, and one bright white one, something pasted onto the night sky from a painting by Magritte.
“Southern, I guess,” Len said.
Mabel nodded, thinking how wonderful it was to see a brand new sky at her age. She was about to say something along those lines when something crossed beneath that bright white cloud. It moved too fast for the eye to follow. Before one could focus on it, it was some place else. Then it was gone entirely, leaving an unsettled feeling.
“Did you see—?”
Len nodded.
“What kind of plane was that, honey?”
“I couldn’t tell.” Which was saying a lot for Len Dawes, who had flown every kind of military aircraft and several civilian ones, and kept up with the industry.
“You think there’s some kind of experimental base near here?”
“I guess they wouldn’t tell us about it if there were.” Len pointed his chin at the sky. “It dropped something.”
You couldn’t have proven that by Mabel, who squinted and saw nothing, but if Len said such a thing it was true. He had spent twenty-two years in the Air Force, the first two as a pilot in Vietnam. His vision was still perfect, which irritated her no end.
Just as the object neared the ground it began to glow, perhaps from heat friction, so that she saw it too. A cylinder that looked small, but no telling how far away it was, except for Len. She looked at him and he said, “‘bout a quarter of a mile that way. Almost seemed like I felt it thump down.”
“Let’s go see,” Mabel said impulsively. She stood up.
Len continued to sit. Going to look at the thing, whatever it was, struck him as a bad idea. “Come on, come on,” Mabel said, holding out her hand. Just like when she was a young wife trying to talk him into an adventure. He was the fighter pilot and world traveler, but Mabel was the adventurer, even if the adventure was only going to a new mall.
Len said quietly, “It might’ve been the pilot, honey. Some kind of new-fangled ejection seat that didn’t open right.”
“Oh.” She dropped her hand. She certainly didn’t want to see something like that.
Len looked up at her. In the dimness her gray hair looked blonde and the lines in her face were invisible even to his sharp eyes. She looked like the slender young girl he had married, mainly because she was more fun than anyone he had ever met. That was still true.
In the end, they didn’t have to decide whether to go look at the fallen object. It came to them.
The mobile home park was mainly for transients, though there were a few permanent residents. Some had even planted trees, and stayed long enough to see them grow high enough to throw shade. In a few minutes there was a rustling sound like wind through the leaves, except that there was no wind. People who were sitting outside stood up. Neighbors drifted over to neighbors’ yards, saying, “Did you see— Do you hear—?”
They were no longer looking up at the sky, which had grown dark, but out toward the distance, from which the rustling sound came.
The creature that came drifting along the road between the homes made everyone who saw it smile. It was a short cylinder, maybe three feet tall, with a rounded top that featured flashing lights. Wheels carried it forward. It looked, in other words, like R2 D2, from “Star Wars.” Kid’s toy, people thought, or maybe the movies were being re-released.
When “R2” drew to a stop, people gathered around. Mabel would have been one of the first, except that her husband stopped her. He had been in too many dangerous situations to take this one at face value. What the hell did he know about Arkansas, anyway? The tranquil setting had suddenly turned foreign to the veteran Len.
“Oh, come on, honey, it’s probably going to give out movie passes. Let’s not be last in line.”
She tugged at him, he resisted, and their hands parted. Mabel Dawes ran toward the cute little robot.
Half a dozen people were standing right around it, pointing at the lights, trying to figure out its beeps. Another dozen people stood a little farther back, folding their arms and shaking their heads, as if the inner circle were careless children. Mabel had just broken through this ring when the little cylinder went dark. People made accusatory remarks at each other, until it rumbled and the top popped open.
“Mabel!” Len yelled then, but the top’s opening made people think the prizes were about to pop out. Mabel leaned forward as curiously as the rest.
And Len turned and ran.
The spiders came crawling out of the opening of the cylinder. Golden spiders the size of a big man’s hand, metallic, obviously manufactured. Nearly everyone has an instinctive fear of spiders, but these glittered like gold, like prizes. People still leaned toward them. Until they began swarming.
The man squatting in front of the cylinder was a long-time resident of the park who got a discounted rate because he was an in-house handyman. He’d been attracted to the robot because he loved tinkering with things like that, had ever since he was a kid, a real “Popular Mechanics” kind of guy. Even the spiders didn’t scare him, because they were obviously machines. The first golden spider jumped right on to him, landed on his leg. His legs were spread for balance. The spider’s legs suddenly extended to both the handyman’s legs and clamped on. Then the body of the spider clamped onto his groin.
The handyman screamed. Not very many people had seen what happened, and most thought Ed had just caught his finger on something, as happened roughly twice a week. They’d heard Ed scream before.
But not like this. His voice went hoarse, rose to a register higher than it should have been able to reach, then abruptly went silent, though the cords stood out on the sides of his neck as if he were still screaming. His hands dug at his crotch, uselessly. Two of the spider’s legs fended off the man’s hands. The spider’s legs were pointed like needles. Exactly like needles. Ed jerked his hand away, even while the pain in his groin held him nearly paralyzed.
The other spiders had spread through the crowd now. They scuttled up people’s legs, feeling light enough to be shaken off, but that was impossible. The points of those legs stuck fast. Once they’d touched you, it didn’t matter if they stayed on, anyway. The injection had happened. People would shake uncontrollably for a few seconds, then go rigid and topple over. Their faces went from red to white to gray, the gray of dead stone.
Some of the spiders—there were dozens—came spilling over the top of the open cylinder as if it were too full of them and they slopped over the top. A few came leaping out as if shot from guns, though. These caught people in the more cautious crowd holding back. They hadn’t been cautious enough. One of the golden spiders landed on a woman’s face, and as its claws dug in and she screamed her husband tried to pull it off, so the spider got them both.
Mabel stood frozen for long seconds. One of the spiders landed on the man next to her, and his screeching woke her up. She looked all around the scene of panic, people running, stumbling, going down under a hoard of spiders, saw there was nothing she could do to help, and looked instinctively for her husband. But Len was nowhere to be seen. He had run away. For the first time in their lives his sense of self-preservation had trumped his concern for her. That was even more disheartening to Mabel than the attack of the spiders.
She ran, jumping over bodies, hearing screams all around her, coming from farther and farther away as the spiders spread through the park with amazing speed. She kept thinking she felt something touch her, but it was only panic singing along her nerves.
Then Mabel couldn’t stand it any longer, she turned and looked back. Everyone else was down, people she’d come to know slightly, others she never would. Spiders crawled over their bodies as if they would strip the flesh. Some of the bodies twitched, and a few moved, horribly, men crawling while covered with the things, as if the spiders had taken over their bodies and were animating them. Screams had been replaced by moans.
Mabel screamed, though, as she saw one of the spiders, one of the biggest ones, withdraw its stinger from a twitching body’s neck and turn its little red LCD eyes on her. Then it bunched its legs together and came jumping toward her.
They could cover distance amazingly. This one scuttled faster than Mabel could run, but then it leaped, first a sort of warm-up, then its legs bunched together and she knew it could leap high enough to reach her face. Even if she turned and ran, it would land on her back, or her leg. Mabel stood frozen again, screaming. The spider leaped. It soared, coming straight toward her face.
It was a foot from her open mouth when it exploded into a hundred golden shards.
Mabel turned away from the shrapnel, took a couple of steps, stumbled, starting falling.
An arm caught her. A still-strong arm she knew well. She turned and buried her face into Len’s neck. He stood with his service automatic, that hadn’t been fired in twenty years. It still could, though. Len had had to rummage through a couple of boxes in the mobile home before he’d found it.
He fired two more shots at the closest spiders, then turned and pulled Mabel away. Spiders swarmed after them. Len fired over his shoulder, hitting two more. But these weren’t living creatures, to be scared off by an obviously lethal weapon. The spiders had no instinct for self-preservation. They kept coming.
But Mabel and Len got into the trailer, slammed the door, held each other, and shook. “I thought you—” she shivered. “You know I’d never—” he answered.
But there was no time. They could hear the continual thumps of the little metal bodies throwing themselves against the door. Len scrambled forward, through the living space, over the table and into the driver’s seat. The keys were in the ignition. He turned it on, and the sound of the big engine starting was like technological cavalry coming over the hill.
“Call 911!” he shouted. “Tell somebody about this!”
Mabel started doing so. She was a good, brave woman, she’d be all right in a minute. Len backed out without paying much attention to his mirrors, then ripped forward, tearing a couple of hoses and electrical wires. They weren’t connected to the RV’s engine, though. They just needed to get a few miles down the road and they could make whatever repairs were needed.
In his mirrors, in the glow of his sidelights, he could see the flashes of golden spiders falling off the vehicle. They bounced on the road, a few lying still, some struggling to catch him. They didn’t have remotely enough speed, though. Len’s blood raced with adrenaline. He knew he could outrun Richard Petty.
Not all the spiders fell off, though. On top of the RV, two clung, legs spread wide, then a drill came out of each body, diamond-tipped, and began drilling. The noise of the engine masked the sound, until each had made a small circular hole. Two legs of each spider lifted the metal circle aside and threw it overboard. Then each dropped through the hole.
Half a mile down the highway, the RV began to shake, rocked both by the driver’s panic and by screams within. The vehicle moved even faster for another quarter of a mile, then went into a skid and finally turned over.
The sound of the crash was not particularly loud. The state highway had a fair amount of traffic, but not at that moment. The RV lay on its side in the night. Nothing emerged from it. Whatever was inside just stayed there, waiting for the rescuers who would inevitably come.
The attack in Omaha was different, but based on the same pattern. The plane too fast to be believed zoomed past, leaving a couple of cylinders in its wake. When people approached to investigate, white powder sprayed out, in a circle wide enough to catch everyone within twenty feet. “Anthrax” was one of the scariest words that could be screamed there in cattle country. The closest victims fell down, dying on the spot. Others on the fringe ran. Some who didn’t even look affected at first crept away, back home, spreading the disease through their families and neighborhoods.
The cruelest happened in Louisville and Minneapolis and Tulsa. There the robots landed on playgrounds just before sunset, where parents let children continue to play in the mild evening. The robots were so familiar to the children they came flocking, and parents hardly even bothered to call them away. Many of the kids didn’t have parents there, anyway. They were neighborhood playgrounds, a block or two from home, within the sound of a parent’s call. And some of the children were young teens, sitting on swings and talking and feeling vaguely nostalgic for their childhoods, so few years past.
When the robots’ tops opened the children were startled, then delighted as the little cylinders spewed out their cargo, spraying them in a high arc where they fell clattering among the children.
Cell phones.
They came in pink and silver and bright metallic green, and everyone grabbed for them. These were nine and ten-year-olds, just below the age of owning their own cell phones, but old enough to crave them. Even the young teenagers who already had cell phones wanted these newer models. They shoved younger kids out of the way to lunge for them. Everyone got one. A few started making calls right away. “Guess what I just got!” The cell phones were already activated. Kids played with them happily, punching buttons to find out their numbers and calling each other, making call lists, playing games. They knew how to work these devices as instinctively as their grandparents had spun tops and picked up jacks.
Most of them didn’t even notice the tiny warm slithery feeling as something was injected from the phones into their ear canals. Certainly no one displayed symptoms in that first golden hour of twilight. The most susceptible grew dizzy walking home. But by early evening they all had fevers. When news began to break about what these cylinders were doing across the country, a few cautious parents took their sick children to emergency rooms. One alarmed ER doctor even ordered a CT scan, and thereby located the tiny radioactive seed that had worked its way down the child’s blood vessels into his lungs, where it was poisoning him with growing rapidity. But finding the seed didn’t solve anything. There was no antidote.
By midnight the parents and caregivers and medical personnel had the “illness” too. The poisoning elements spread with amazing speed. Hundreds were infected before morning, and the infection like wildfire as emergency workers tried to contain it. Whole portions of the three cities were quarantined, but to no avail.
Cell phones lay on the floor of children’s bedrooms and hospital rooms.
The culmination of the evening was a small nuclear explosion in the Nevada desert, close in fact to the area where nuclear testing had been conducted for decades. This one, though, was close enough for Las Vegans to see the mushroom cloud. The desert winds were unpredictable, no one was willing to guess whether they would blow the radioactive dust toward the city or away from it. Evacuation began haphazardly at first, then with slightly more organization, but emptying America’s fastest-growing city in only a few hours’ time was impossible. There weren’t enough ways out. As in Houston when Hurricane Rita had approached a decade earlier, the city turned into one giant gridlock, and stayed that way for hours. No one died of radiation poisoning, but several were killed in car wrecks, and looting was widespread. Even fabled casino security broke down, as guards began helping themselves to cash along with the customers. A few kept playing the slots, deep into the night.
The President went on the air at 5:30 a.m., Eastern Time. It was still dark all across the country, and many people hadn’t yet heard of the attacks. Nevertheless, President Witt had an audience of eighty million viewers, which increased when the tape was replayed on all the morning news shows.
“My fellow Americans,” he began. “Some of you have heard of the mysterious attacks across this country in the last few hours. This is not a time to panic. Emergency personnel are responding. The victims are being treated and the threats ended. There have been many casualties, but we do not expect any more. The danger is being contained.
“The best thing all of you can do for your country today is to go about your normal lives. The attacks were very confined. Most American cities were not affected at all. Let us show the world the strength of Americans. We will live through this. We will prosper and grow.
“Our intelligence services have been working through the night and will continue to work to find the source of these attacks. In the first analysis, we believe this threat to our national security is not from a … not from a terrorist nation or even a terrorist group. No group has claimed responsibility.”
Now the President looked his gravest as he stared into the camera lens. Jefferson Witt had gotten elected partly because of his mature, thoughtful appearance. Exhausted by a cowboy presidency, a majority of Americans wanted someone stable and gray, even slow. Tonight Witt looked much grayer than when he’d been elected a year ago. His first visible response to the crisis was to look tired.
But there was resolve in his voice. In his next sentences he would take the first major steps of his presidency, the ones that would define him for history. And he believed deeply in what he was about to say. His eyes grew livelier and his voice stronger.
“But these attacks will not be ended by reprisals, no matter how rapidly and forcefully we respond. That kind of reaction is from another age. That page of history has been turned.
“Every nation, no matter how powerful, is vulnerable to attacks such as we have seen overnight. They will not end by our destroying some terrorist bases or even toppling regimes and occupying whole countries. We have seen the failures of such policies in recent years.
“No. We are going to do what my advisors and I had planned to do already, what I campaigned saying America should do. A large majority agreed with me. Well, now is the time.
“We are going to begin withdrawing American forces from around the globe. We are calling our men and women home. They have been stretched too thin for too long. We will not demand more of them.”
The President raised one finger and shook it as if reprimanding a class. “No more will America be the world’s policeman or the world’s whipping boy. We are going to stand down. We will be an equal at the world’s table. Other nations will have to solve their own problems.”
The President knew the danger he faced. It was difficult to put a good face on this retreat, with dead Americans, many of them children, lying in hospitals and morgues across the country. But he and his speechwriters thought they knew how America would respond, and they counted on the fact that a large majority of Americans were exhausted from years of war and intervention. Jefferson Witt was a picture of strength, not of cowardice, as he continued to stare forcefully into the camera.
“America has never run from a fight. We have plunged into so many conflicts in order to save someone else. We are not running from this. But this is not a fight, not in any sense we have ever known. There is no other country to attack. We will continue to work to bring these attackers to justice, but that doesn’t mean we have to continue to support a huge military establishment in order to protect the world. That is not our job, if it ever was. This is not a retreat, it is a consolidation. A protection of our own vital interests.
“I have ordered the immediate withdrawal of the first units of American troops from the Middle East, from Asia, from Europe. This will not be done in haste, but in a timely way we will bring all our forces home.”
The President smiled. It was a slight smile, but on his craggy face, at the end of that terrible night, it was dazzling. The President’s smile reassured. His voice was hearty as he concluded, “This is the end of the age of American domination. But it is the dawn of the age of American peace. Of America taking care of itself. This will be the golden age. My fellow Americans, I ask you to join me in asking God to bless our great nation as we step forward into a bright new day. Thank you.”
There seemed to be a long moment’s silence across the entire country. It was broken, at least in the Circle’s Colorado compound, by Gladys Leaphorn, who exclaimed, “The Age of American Selfishness. He has proclaimed it!”
“And America wants it,” Jack said quietly. “That’s why Witt got elected.”
“This is what he’s wanted to announce all along,” Arden said, then her eyes shot around the room. “You don’t think—”
“No.” Jack shook his head, and he wasn’t the only one. “He wouldn’t do it like this. Even Witt isn’t that stupid. If anything, these attacks probably slowed down his plans. But you know—”
“Yes,” the Chair said wearily. There was much more to this than the President’s public announcement. There always was. Within a few hours they should know more. “Let’s wait until the others get here,” Gladys added, and she rolled away for a morning nap. She was back in her wheelchair, and moving very slowly. Jack and Arden exchanged a glance, and Arden jumped up to help her grandmother to bed.
“But Witt is our man!” exclaimed a senior member of the Circle. “We helped get him elected. We have all kinds of—”
“We helped him because we knew his election was inevitable anyway,” Alicia Mortenson said, and her husband nodded. They were now wearing outlandish flowered shirts and touristy shorts. No one asked if they’d been vacationing when they’d gotten the call to assemble. Maybe this was just the way they dressed around the house.
“But my point,” insisted the first man, “is that we exert all kinds of influence over him. So many vectors intersect at him—”
“Perhaps we’re not so influential as we think,” interrupted Janice Gentry, the Yale history professor. “Someone certainly seems to have dominated him in the first reaction to this crisis.”
There weren’t as many members gathered as there had been at the last meeting, only a dozen or so, in the bunker at the base of the Rocky Mountains that was the group’s only fallback position, or at least the only one Jack knew about. But these dozen represented all wings of the group’s power and influence: academia, diplomatic, the scientific and entertainment industries, and one junior editorial writer from the Denver Post.
The one who had proclaimed the group’s influence was Professor Clifford Warner, currently on sabbatical at the Sorbonne, who had happened to be at an academic conference in Chicago and had rushed here when the attacks began. Warner was a tall, thin man, with long arms and legs that sometimes distracted his students from what he was saying. Today he couldn’t sit still. He paced and fretted, making everyone tired. “That National Security Advisor,” he exclaimed, snapping his fingers. “The one none of us knows. He must be behind this.”
Jack wanted to say, “Duh,” but he was much too junior in this group. Besides, icy politeness was more this group’s style than outright insult. Professor Gentry applied the style as she said, “Excellent thinking, Clifford. I believe you’re right. But we must stop this now. Withdrawal of our forces from around the world will be like the ocean receding, exposing things we wish to remain hidden.”
Craig Mortenson said quietly, “I have one source privy to the President’s plan. It’s worse than he announced. Withdrawing troops is only phase one. He even wants to close our embassies. Leave no American presence in the world at all. He believes this will take away any incentive to attack us. Only American companies would continue to operate abroad. We would be the world’s bankers and businessmen, but not its diplomats or soldiers.”
Startled, Arden cried, “But that—!” She recovered quickly, cutting off the sentence she didn’t need to say. The grave faces told her as much.
Gladys Leaphorn asked Craig, “Does your source have any influence?”
Craig answered slowly, “My source is not a policy advisor and is not one of us. If—my source—ever offered an opinion, probably the President’s confidence would be withdrawn. We wouldn’t even have a pipeline to his thinking.”
Everyone heard the careful gender-neutrality of Craig Mortenson’s statement. He wasn’t usually so politically correct. They wondered just how close to the President his source was.
But that person wasn’t going to be any help at the moment. “Let’s go!” the Chair said. “We need to do what we do. But we need to do it more quickly than we ever have before. Some subtlety may need to be abandoned.”
“On the other hand,” Jack ventured to say, “perhaps we can slow down events to allow—”
Gladys snapped her fingers and pointed his direction, awarding Jack points. He didn’t smile. The Chair turned to someone else in the group and said, “Call General Reynolds and our other military contacts. Surely it will not be possible to mobilize such a large withdrawal very quickly.”
The member smiled. “Some of those boys can take three weeks to strike a tent. And there are always vouchers to mislay. Foot-dragging is what our forces do best. In peacetime, anyway. I’ll—”
He turned away without finishing the sentence. Another couple of members had already slipped away as well. Gladys raised her voice. “We should know more in a few hours. We’ll keep you informed. And you keep us informed as well. This is not SOP. We must coordinate. Work your contacts, but report here before you do anything. This must be a joint operation. No rogue missions. Understand?”
They were already leaving, some of them shuffling, some walking briskly on high heels. They were a very strange-looking task force for being assigned the job of saving the world. The median age was about fifty-five, and none of them was a secret agent or even a soldier. Nevertheless, their backs were straight, their eyes alight and most of all their brains churning. It was a brave band of siblings that headed swiftly for the exits.
“Go Hornets,” Jack said quietly.