Judgement

by Fergus Bannon

She swarmed up the side of the building like a monkey and he had to smile despite his unease. He would just have to get used to feeling like this. If he could secure for himself even half the love she had for climbing, he would be a privileged man.

  The light from the arch seemed to be making it even easier for her than before and she was soon past her window and within twenty feet of the edge of the roof. As she was passing the highest flat, a movement to his side caught his eye. He turned and saw a man ten feet away smiling at him.

  Leith started to smile back, thinking it was Edwards, when his stomach turned to ice. It was the Israeli, the one who survived St. Louis. The man seemed to have waited for the recognition to show in Leith's face because immediately he brought something out from under his coat.

  It was a gun, some kind of rifle.

  The muzzle swung up, Leith's stomach shrinking away as it passed across it, then it was past him and describing an arc up the building.

  His scream of horror was lost in the crashing sound of the gun's discharge, his eyes dimming as the muzzle flash shrunk his pupils. Still screaming, he could just make out the figure on the building as it jerked in a hailstorm of mortar and brick and bullets. For a moment it hung there as though suspended by the pressure of high velocity lead. Then it was falling, the coat billowing around it like the limp wings of a bird killed in flight.

  With the sickening sound of impact came the anger and the fleeing of thought. Roaring with animal hatred he rushed forward, his hands clawed like talons, hitting the man with the force of his charge, taking him down to the floor. The man's body felt so light, so small, so easy to smash. With one hand round the man's throat, he raised his other to crush his skull.

  'No, Bob! Don’t!’

  And he saw it was Lola.

  He froze, arm still raised, wildly scrutinising her shocked little face as she prised open his paralysed fingers from her throat. She started to cough. 'You're crushing me! Get off!'

  Gently he got off her, then stood up and walked like a zombie over to the huddled dark thing by the building. It was dead, its skull opened by the fall, but its face though bloody was preserved. Leith wondered, dazedly, whether they would ever find out the Israeli's name. Numbly, automatically, his hands began to search through the man's clothes for identification.

  He felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. She was still breathless. 'I don't understand, Bob. What happened?'

  He rose and took her in his arms, his tears making a soft padding sound as they dropped down onto her coat. He looked up at the rainbow. It seemed as good a place as any.

  'Thank you,' he said. 'Thank you so very much.'

  Later, when the rest of the world had arrived and Edwards' corpse had been found in a lot two blocks away, Leith got a moment to himself. Lola, despite his protestations but greatly to his admiration, had repeated her climb and was on the roof looking at the arch, now directly overhead.

  He sat on the hood of a squad car looking up. The voice when it came was female. It was soft, urgent and from behind and to the right of him.

  'Be at the UN meeting on the 8th,' it said.

  Leith turned, but wasn't surprised that no one else was there.

  The supermarket lights were bright and dazzling. The man pushed his trolley through the cereals section. Dressed in jeans and a casual jacket he seemed somehow uncomfortable, uneasy, out of place.

  Apparently spotting the cereal he was looking for he made towards it, gently swerving to miss another man pushing a trolley in the opposite direction.

  'Verity,' he whispered as the other passed by.

  CHAPTER 18

  Midtown, New York

  It was hot and noisy in the studio with too many people clustered into too small a space. Feeling claustrophobic, Leith turned and rested his forehead against the cool glass. The General Assembly Hall, majestic in its emptiness, lay below him.

  'She's not going to make it.' Carlsson's dogmatism was already beginning to grate. The guy talked like everything he said should be written down in stone for posterity.

  'Would you please move behind the cameras!' The harassed floor manager was shooing the Chinese and Russian observers away from Kennealy and Valeur. Studios in the UN seemed to have been designed for little more than one-to-one interviews, not for panel discussions. The harsh glare of the additional lights erased the studio's grubbiness, but exaggerated every break and hole in the old style acoustic tiles.

  Valeur's makeup woman hovered round him like a gnat, dabbing away the imperfections. Gauntly good looking on screen, he'd appeared unexpectedly raddled in the flesh. But then he'd been going for years, serving his time on West Coast stations, then the nationals, before finally fronting up TransPac News when it began broadcasting in the late eighties. The permanent air of wounded sensitivity he brought to his special reports on global horrors had won him predominantly female adoration throughout the Pacific Rim. Nobody could report a good famine like Valeur.

  Unusually for a journalist, he'd had a good grounding in science and technology. An intellectual who had carved a niche in the decerebrate world of satellite broadcasting, he was an interesting choice as an interviewer.

  Keneally was looking at Valeur's primping with faint unease. A veteran of innumerable chat shows and science specials, he'd never managed to seem totally at ease with the medium. He was a short man, dressed in the kind of dark green corduroy suit Leith had once favoured, before he’d been introduced to the social advantages of really good clothing. Despite the Celtic name, Keneally was darkly tanned. His deeply set brown eyes flickered nervously around the studio.

  Nkobe had scorned the makeup. There was little chance he'd look pale under the studio lights. Corpulent, with hemispherical cheeks and several chins, he mopped repeatedly at the perspiration that glistened on his brow.

  'How come that guy Nkobe looks so nervous? He must be used to cameras by now.'

  Carlsson turned to look back. 'He's Secretary General of the UN, for Christ's sake. They all look nervous. I mean, think about it: hundreds of the most powerful people in the world , twisting your arm for this and that, every day of your working life. No thanks!'

  The floor manager held up his hand. 'Three minutes. Quiet, please,' he yelled above the hubbub. The other observers, huddled in one corner of the studio, fell quiet for ten seconds before the noise level began to rise again.

  'No show,' said Carlsson with finality. Tall as Leith but more slender, he had the build of a marathon runner. Every pose he struck was like something out of a fashion magazine, though his clothes were unfashionably baggy enough to conceal the point man's usual panoply of horrors.

  'Don't be so sure.'

  'So where's she going to come from? Thin air? Look at that.' Carlsson was pointing through the glass to the adjoining studio, where a bank of TV monitors had been set up. They showed internal views of the studio approaches, and scenes shot from cameras on the roof overlooking the East River. Other cameras pointed up and down Roosevelt Drive, and down the long perspective of 45th Street. Everything looked bright and crisp in the clear autumn sunshine. Huge crowds clustered round the UN, most come to get an adoring glimpse of Verity. The rainbow had struck a deeply resonant chord in mankind's collective soul.

  'No way could she get through the crowd. As for the airspace, it's locked tight!' Carlsson turned away in a gesture clearly signifying 'end of story' in his rather abrupt body language. He put a finger to his ear to listen into the security communications.

  The UN had its own security team and they could handle security within the building, but Verity attracted a level of threat they'd never had to deal with before. Too many people wanted her dead. The company, through Leith, had made it plain they were willing to take up the slack.

  An AWAC was monitoring the airspace against incursions, and anti-missile batteries had had to be set up on strategic positions in Manhattan and Queens. All points on both sides of the river that had a vantage point on the General Assembly were being guarded.

  '
Sixty seconds,' the floor manager was almost wailing. 'Quiet everyone!'

  'I told you,' said Carlsson, ‘it’s a no-show.'

  The slats of the wooden bench pressed hard into his almost fleshless backside. The room was boiling hot, only the metal of the locker door feeling cold against the back of his bald head.

  A small window set high up against the ceiling revealed a rectangle of bright blue sky. It formed the screen on which he was replaying the film of his life. Appropriately enough, because the sky had always permeated his existence, beckoning him on to ride blazing trails of flame into the stratosphere. Life had seemed sweet and endless and triumphant.

  He sighed deeply and closed his eyes. The fever suppressants were cutting out, and soon the pain relief would diminish. The first intimations would be dull and diffuse, the pains referred to chest and legs.

  Rouse had even insisted he stop the steroids. The slight twinges he always felt in neck and groin and armpits would get worse, the lesions bulking out and becoming red hot foci of pain.

  The roar of a jet flying low overhead shattered his reverie. He started to put on his flying suit.

  With barely fifteen seconds to go, the chair reserved for Verity became suddenly occupied. Even Nkobe managed to struggle to his feet. The three men stood round her gaping.

  'Jesus!' Leith was gratified to see the look of shock on Carlsson's face.

  The floor manager was the first to rally. 'No time for introductions. Quiet please, we're on!' He signalled wildly.

  Portentous music swelled up in the background and the three men resumed their seats, struggling for composure. Verity gave them each a little smile.

  Durrell, trussed up in his hospital bed, must be loving this, thought Leith. If de Meer had looked like Margaret Dumont, this one looked like Minny Mouse. Short and slight, she had to sit on the edge of her seat so that her broad heavy shoes could touch the ground. Her thin bony hands were clasped together in the lap of her dark skirt. A bracelet and ring caught the harsh studio lights, her only other jewellery being a string of indifferent looking pearls resting across the front of her plain white blouse.

  'What the fuck's going on?' he heard Carlsson say, but ignored him.

  Verity glanced around the room. She seemed nervous. The flesh in her eye sockets had retreated with age, making her look slightly pop-eyed. She kept looking at each of the three men in turn, almost as if she was seeking reassurance.

  'She looks like a schoolteacher,' said Carlsson. 'Were you expecting this?' but just then the music stopped.

  'Welcome to what may conceivably be the most important TV broadcast of all time,' Valeur was speaking to camera. 'All the world...'

  'Oh it is. It really is.' Verity's marked overbite made her voice sound plummy. It also made her accent difficult to place.

  'I'm sorry,' Valeur easily, as though being interrupted in front of billions of people was the most natural thing in the world.

  Watching a studio monitor, Leith could see that this time the camera caught her when she spoke.

  'This is the most important broadcast of all time.'

  Valeur smiled again and the camera was back on him. 'I'm sure it is, but for the benefit of the viewers I think a little recap might be in order. Less than two weeks ago a ring of satellites...'

  The decals and warning notices were badly scuffed, betraying the F-15B's age. Fitting, he thought. A fucked-up plane for a fucked-up man.

  The Eagle's shape, normally sleek and deadly with the sharp tips of air-to-air missiles protruding from the wings like talons, was now marred by the heavy mass of underslung ordnance. It made the plane look heavy, almost pregnant. He laughed at this disturbing thought, wanting to go out riding a rampant stallion, not a gravid mare.

  The hard, thickened glands in his crotch chaffed and caught as he struggled up the ladder. The technicians had to push him up by his ass before he could heave himself into the cockpit. One followed him up to hook him into the systems. The solid sounds of interlocking connectors made it seem like a kind of robot sex, an act of coupling between man and machine.

  He laughed again at the confused imagery, and the technician's eyes narrowed. Then, tapping once on Logan's helmet, he was gone.

  Logan started through the checklist.

  '...and finally we have Verity herself,' Valeur was finishing his introductions. 'I imagine you took your name from the Latin veritas, meaning truth.'

  'Obviously,' she raised her eyes as though she were chiding him.

  'She even sounds like a schoolteacher,' said Carlsson disbelievingly.

  'Verity, The Truth broadcast indicated that you would make an extremely important announcement. Do you wish to make that now?'

  'I think it'll emerge as I answer your questions.'

  'As you wish. Perhaps I could get the ball rolling by asking you to confirm the existence of extraterrestrials.'

  'Definitely.'

  'But you are a human being.'

  'Yes.'

  Keneally lifted a finger and the camera shot changed. He leaned forward excitedly. 'The technology you use is of extraterrestrial origin?'

  'Obviously. The rainbow arch, access to past events, how else could I have done it?'

  'How can you access the past?'

  Verity nodded her head. Her lifeless dark hair, shot through with grey hairs, hardly moved. 'It's not possible by mankind's technology, but our science does indicate something like it. Perhaps I can use an analogy: Earth’s geological history is recorded permanently in the rock strata, and the same can be said for the whole universe, except that its record is embedded in space-time, and created by the wavefront we call 'now'. Everything—and I mean absolutely everything—anybody has ever done, is recorded somewhere in the space-time block. That's an Einsteinian concept, nothing new. The actual mechanism by which my data is stored is actually very different, but the idea shouldn't come as a surprise.'

  Carlsson was right. She did sound like a schoolteacher.

  Nkobe had made no move to speak. Looking nonplussed he kept mopping at the perspiration on his forehead. Valeur signalled that he wanted to cut in but Keneally pressed on:

  'If you have access to the past can you alter it?'

  'No. To pursue the analogy, palaeontologists can inspect the rock strata, but they can't change the Earth's past.'

  'Verity, you...' said Valeur but Keneally bulldozed through:

  'And the future? Can you see that? Does it, in a sense, already exist?'

  'I don't know. I certainly can't access it.'

  This time, before Valeur could speak, the rich and resonant tones of Nkobe cut in. 'Is that where you get your justification? Justification for the punishments you mete out so freely?'

  'Yes.'

  Leith's pursed his lips and regarded Nkobe with new interest.

  The African's eyes were suddenly hard. 'You have used your 'judgement' on many people recently, have you not? Judgement, sentence and execution.'

  The UN had always seemed a weak, ignorant, strife-riven organisation, kept deliberately in the dark by its own member states. How much did Nkobe know?

  Verity looked unflinchingly back. Her face, with its small chin looked naturally weak, but now there was something about the mouth, something harder.

  'Yes,' said the pompous little voice.

  'Mass slaughter, in fact,' said Nkobe, his voice loud and deep with anger. 'Politicians, policemen, doctors and nurses. Murdered!'

  'Yes,' said Verity.

  'But why?' asked Valeur, so taken aback he forgot to signal he was about to speak. The camera shot flicked to him too late, then changed back to Verity.

  'The Secretary General is using the most emotive examples. But yes, I have executed doctors and nurses, specifically the medical personnel who aided and abetted the torture and murder of victims of right wing death squads in El Salvador. I executed them by precisely the same means they executed others, by injecting air bubbles and hydrochloric acid into their veins.'

  'By what right did yo
u do this?' Valeur's attitude seemed to be undergoing a sea change. The man must have relished all the information provided by The Truth, and must have come expecting to eulogise rather than deplore.

  'By what right did they kill others in the first place? And remember those are the most emotive examples. Others include mercenaries, drug warlords, gangsters...'

  'The Las Vegas massacre!' Keneally interjected.

  'Yes. All...'

  'I don't believe this,' Keneally had a hand to his forehead, 'you control technology beyond our imagination and you use it to kill gangsters!'

  Verity stared back at him unperturbed.

  'I can justify every single execution. I can show you every sordid act those people committed. I am in a position to judge better than any court, because my evidence is absolute and impervious to doubt. In fact I am constrained by the solidity of this evidence. I can only inflict on people what they have inflicted on others.'

  Nkobe was shaking his head. 'And what about forgiveness? What about the possibility of rehabilitation? What about mercy?'

  'There is no time, Secretary General,' she looked sad. 'I would've done all this in another way if I could. But radical changes were required.'

  'Such as?'

  'Well, for a start I've taken away all your nuclear weapons.'

  He took it easy at first, testing his swollen body with a gently increasing climb. As the G's rose the flight suit inflated around his legs and abdomen, preventing blood loss from his head, but chaffing at his armpits and groin. At 20,000 feet he levelled out and savoured the blue of the sky and the vivid reds of the Maryland autumn.

  This time it was for the pain. The needle of the green altitude display was whirling like a dervish before he began to pull her out of the dive. Suddenly it was like being trapped in a tight cupboard with a lifejacket that had instantly inflated. Breath hissed from between his teeth as his ribcage contracted. The suit chiselled its way into every crevice of his body. Breathless, he could only yell soundlessly.