The War of Immensities

by Barry Klemm

  “How’d you manage that?” Joe asked Pascoe in the next break in proceedings.

  “Harley planned to put into the record an accusation that President Grayson knew all about Project Earthshaker’s activities and approved the payments himself.”

  “You mean he wasn’t going to take the fifth?”

  “Since he’s Norwegian, not American, I don’t think he can. But anyhow, can you imagine Harley doing something like that?”

  “No.”

  “Nor would he. He planned to get acknowledgment of Earthshaker into the record and then let them fight over it.”

  “They wouldn’t have let him...”

  “The important thing about a show trial is you make sure you control what gets shown.”

  “And where does that leave me?” Joe asked, though cheerfully.

  “In the toilet. You’re all they’ve got now. Since you deny all knowledge of the original source of the funds and since you refuse to incriminate Thyssen, that just leaves you out on a limb.”

  “I can handle that.”

  “Are you sure? Is he worth protecting like this? After all, he has happily landed you right in it.”

  “I’m not protecting Harley. I don’t really know whether I trust him or even care about him myself. Although I do admire him. It’s the project I’m protecting.”

  “But the project is Thyssen.”

  “So they would have you believe. And they ridicule him and call him a fake and a liar and therefore discredit the project in the eyes of the public. It seems that no amount of truth and evidence can combat media lies.”

  “Are you sure he’s not really a very charismatic crank?”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “It’s not my role to have such an opinion.”

  “And the evidence you’ve seen doesn’t convince you otherwise.”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe it does. But I don’t wish to believe what the evidence tells me. That doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “Oh I see. Better to believe the lie than face unpalatable facts.”

  “Yes, Joe. I think so. If Thyssen and all those other Loony Tunes are right and the planet is about to blow itself up and there isn’t a damned thing we can do, why worry yourself to death about it? Better to just ignore it and carry on normally.”

  “All the other Loony Tunes are Loony Tunes, Clyde. Every fucked-brain fanatic in the world has hopped on this bandwagon. Only Harley is not one of them.”

  “He seems like one of them.”

  “They make him seem like one of them.”

  “In this age of media domination, Joe, it’s the same thing.”

  *

  Another family group, seventeen members this time spanning four generations, recumbent about the single room. Wagner would have thought they were sleeping, had he not known they were dead. Outside a clutter of ambulances and police cars stood waiting helplessly, and the paramedics who had been first on the scene now stood back, smoking, and averting their gaze.

  “They are waiting for forensic, but I can tell you what happened,” Captain Tonishu said bitterly. “They waited until the children were asleep and then burned the candles you see on the table which were laced with a chemical, turned to a poisonous gas by the flame. It is a common enough method in this country, sure and relatively painless.”

  Wagner, from a distance, gazed upon the faces of two small children that were turned toward him. Pain and fear showed there plainly. The poor kids had wakened in the last moments of life and had known...

  “And they were all on our list?” he asked, to be sure of the obvious.

  “Oh yes. They left this message.”

  He held up a scroll with the square of carefully painted characters—the mass suicide note must have taken hours to write.

  “How can this happen?” Wagner asked the room in general, ignoring the message.

  “It is a common enough occurrence,” the captain said in his flat dispassionate tone.

  Perhaps, Wagner liked to think, it was the man’s unsure command of English that make him sound so heartless. “In Japan, the suicide rate is very high, especially amongst the young. Many of those removed from our list did so by this means. This is only the most shocking case and I thought it would be best if you saw it.”

  “Thank very much,” Wagner said in disgust.

  He remembered now, lines drawn through names with the symbol for suicide placed by Tamiko. He had ignored it at the time. Just another one we don’t have to find, he thought. And perhaps the Captain knew that, or suspected it, and he brought him to see this to place him more in touch with the reality. Perhaps, just as the captain seemed to lack compassion to him, so did he to the captain.

  Three more groups and a number of individuals had been located and processed and were on their way to Brazil. Before this happened, the list had been reduced to twenty-eight, plus one. Katsumi Sukurai, a young man, had been captured three times and each time escaped—he was on the run again.

  He had escaped from the airport when he was found to be missing from the flight manifest, he had escaped while being transported to the police station, he had escaped from the House of the Golden Carp when the rest of his family had been brought in. You can’t leave even one behind, Thyssen had told him, and Wagner knew that and wondered. Katsumi Sukurai was the subject of his worst nightmares—until this.

  Wagner turned, leaving the room and its horrors, and walked out into the sunlight.

  “Don’t you want to know what the message says,” the captain asked as he hurried after Wagner.

  “No!” Wagner said ruthlessly. “But I guess you better tell me anyhow.”

  The captain had not brought the document with him. He had carefully replaced it where it was found, for the benefit of the official investigators. But he could recite it.

  “It sought many blessings from spirits and friends and asked their forgiveness for the sorrows to follow. It said that they had heard that the American press reported that Professor Thyssen was a mad scientist conducting unnatural experiments on human subjects. It said they wished to take this more honourable path to the cure of their wandering disease.”

  Mad scientist, Wagner heard an inner voice shriek. Unnatural experiments, it shrieked again. Bastards. The lies were always most dangerous when they paraphrased the truth.

  *

  For the first time since his arrival in Washington a week ago, Thyssen discovered he was alone. It was hard to credit really. His watchdogs—a rotating roster of indistinguishable Secret Service agents—declared that threats had been made against his life and that he was in protective custody. The difference between that condition and house arrest, which had been his status last time he’d been here and even in the same room—who could forget 3333—at the same hotel, was that arrest meant the guards stayed outside his room and he wasn’t allowed to leave whereas protective custody apparently permitted them to be right there in the room with him. But he could go anywhere he liked, with one man before and one after and two more prowling wide on the flanks.

  He didn’t have anywhere he wanted to go and certainly not with them, but each day they took him someplace else where he was questioned by different people—Treasury, Senate advisers, FBI, tame scientists and someone named Cornelius who didn’t seem to belong to any agency at all. They were all very friendly and so he answered all of their questions with absolute honesty.

  “Yes, President Grayson knew about the funding. He told me so personally.”

  “The president denies it.”

  “It happened in the Oval Office. Am I to assume such conversations are no longer taped?”

  “Not since Nixon.”

  “Very wise.”

  “Did you know the source of the funding?”

  “Of course not. Grayson just said funding would be made available and it suddenly turned up in our bank account.”

  “And you didn’t ask.”

  “I didn’t care.”

  “And what instruction
s did you give Mr Solomon in regard to the funds?”

  “None.”

  “Yet he was acting under your orders.”

  “At no time was he under my orders.”

  “I don’t think the senators will be satisfied with that answer.”

  “The truth rarely pleases politicians.”

  “But I thought you were going to take the 5th Amendment?”

  “I changed my mind. I’m going to tell them the truth, the whole truth and every bloody bit of the truth.”

  “You’ll go to jail.”

  “Bad luck.”

  “You’ll blow your whole damned project right out of the water.”

  “Yeah, and Grayson and all you bastards along with it.”

  On the eighth day, they stopped interviewing him and he heard on the news that he had taken the 5th Amendment by proxy. Apparently he was unable to attend the hearing on health grounds. A mental disorder seemed to be the nature of the complaint. Next day they brought him to this nondescript building, not far from the Pentagon, he noticed. They rode and elevator that plainly lied about what floor they were going to and he was escorted down a corridor to an unmarked doorway.

  “In there,” the secret service man said and Thyssen went through, and his guardians did not. In the dimness, he waited for his eyes to adjust.

  The room was huge and might have been the control room at NASA. Rows of computer screens offered the same screen-saver—that of a quietly rotating earth viewed from space. Thyssen thought he must remember to get one of those before he left. There were nine rows of tables, each with ten operator positions, each row stepped below the next so at they all had an unimpeded view of the massive screen facing them. There was a map of the world, with tactical spots marked. The locations of the eruptions were marked in red, the locations of the sleepers were marked in yellow, blue circle indicated the Zones of influence for each event, green indicated individual volcanoes, white the predicted future locations. Which, he could immediately see with a smile, were all wrong. But impressive, nevertheless.

  He stepped forward to the nearest monitor and touched the keyboard blindly. The screen immediately offered his own version of the map. Stooping only minimally, Thyssen moved the mouse and clicked on the red dot over Japan. A regional map appeared with about thirty markers. The red one was the House of the Golden Carp. Click on that and he got a list, PEO looked promising and he tried it—Project Earthshaker Operative, it meant and a complete dossier on Wagner appeared. Thyssen, bent more severely over the table, refusing to sit in the chair so that he had to reach over to get at the mouse. He backed out and tried OSP. Right on—Outstanding Personnel. It listed the nineteen Japanese sleepers that Wagner was yet to locate.

  “Ten bucks says he doesn’t make it,” a voice said quietly from the far side of the room.

  Thyssen raised only his eyes and peered in the direction of the voice. It sounded familiar, slightly, but when he saw the figure, it took him far longer than it should have to realise who it was.

  “I don’t know you,” he said and returned his attention to the screen.

  “I thought all teachers remembered all of their students.”

  “It’s an illusion. All students are alike. You can tell the same story about each of them.”

  “What story is that?”

  “First they know nothing. Then you teach them everything they know. Whereby they grab their bit of paper, forget everything you said and sell their asses to big business.”

  “Some asses buy more than others.”

  “They’re all for sitting and shitting.”

  From across the room came more laughter than the remark justified. “It is really good to see you again, Harley. You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this.”

  “It only been six months since you sold us out, Glen.”

  “I didn’t sell you out. I was hi-jacked. But then they offered me this. How could I refuse?”

  “Did I forget to give my lecture on loyalty?”

  “My option was them or nothing. I took them. They pay well and the work is interesting. And look at this, Harley. Look around you. And it’s all mine.”

  “Yeah. But who owns you?”

  “The government. The duly elected government of this country.”

  “You’re using the taxpayer’s money to spy on my project and find out what I would freely have told you anyway.”

  “Bullshit, Harley. You kept secrets. You didn’t tell us everything.”

  “Sometimes I’m forgetful.”

  Glen advanced now, three rows down and halfway around the room, but into better lighting. He was nearly unrecognisable. The long hair, moustache and wispy beard were gone, and the hippie duds were traded for silken shirt and snappy trousers. When he stood with his hands in his pockets, he looked like a model in a Calvin Kline advertisement. He was handsome enough to make the cut as well.

  “Look at all this, Harley,” Glen said again. “All this is yours.”

  “I wouldn’t be happy here, Palenski. It’s too orderly. I like it messy.”

  Glen pushed some papers and files on the desk beside him and let them fall on the floor. “We could mess it up a bit.”

  “It isn’t a matter of messing up. It the notion of things having a right place that I object to.”

  “Everything has to be somewhere.”

  “Yeah. And where you last used it is where you’re most likely to find it.”

  “Think of how efficiently you could operate from here,” Glen said again. “Go on. Try it.”

  “I tried it. It’s nice. But the price is out of my range.”

  “Have a try. It’s an awesome system...”

  Thyssen, standing straight, reached with a minimal finger and touched out keys. He typed a code to open a dialogue box, inserted the user name HORSESHIT after which a row of asterisks appeared as he entered a password. Glen was able to press a single key to bring it up on his own screen.

  “It isn’t like you to be vulgar, Harley.”

  Then, after an slight pause, the system jumped to life and encrypted data burst onto the display.

  “Shit, what’s this?” Glen asked in amazed.

  “It’s where I stashed a bunch of private files on Val Dennis’s system,” Thyssen said quietly.

  Glen was thrown for only a moment, but it was enough for Thyssen to see the point was lost on him.

  “You see. Like I said. We got everything in here.”

  “You bastards murdered him for this.”

  “Nobody murdered him...” Glen sighed, but he looked back at the screen, perplexed for an additional instant.

  “Oh I see. He stole his own data and gave it to the very people he opposed with every microbe in his body and then he wrecked his own system and beat himself to death.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Glen said, but he needed to sit down to continue. “He was done in a routine drug bust. He resisted and the narks did him over. They showed their usual tidy housekeeping searching for his stash until they found his fake security clearance which they thought was real and panicked. That’s how we heard about it. We went over and salvaged what we could of his data. We’d have given it back to him, had he lived.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it possible for someone to emerge from one of my courses and still be so bloody naive.”

  “Come on, Harley. I was there at the time and saw it all go down. It’s the truth. You gotta believe it.”

  “I believe that you believe it, Glen. You poor sorry bastard. The drug squad could have busted Val any time they liked from the day he entered high school. But they waited until the moment suited them best. Joe demanded charges be laid but the fuzz couldn’t find any record of any such raid. Then they went around there and found a closet full of cocaine. Do you seriously believe they missed it the first time when they went through the place like Typhoid Mary?”

  “Well it wasn’t done from here...”

  “And you reckon I should offer my services to folks who pl
ay the game that way.”

  Glen gathered himself. He stood again and walked away from the incriminating computer screen as if he suddenly feared contamination.

  “You don’t have any choice, Harley. This is the only game in town.”

  “I can still operate.”

  “No you can’t. Not when they’ve got the public thinking you’re a blood relative of Fu Manchu.”

  “You think I haven’t been called crazy before?”

  “Harley, they’ll put you out of business, one way or the other.”

  “Are you listening to what you’re saying?”

  “Yes, and I don’t like it but its the way it is. This damn thing is too big and too important to leave in the hands of one man. Even a great man, like you, Harley.”

  “And that’s the reason why they want to stop me?”

  “The days of renegade individualism are over, Harley. You haven’t got a chance.”

  “There are some things that are too big to be stopped, Palenski.”

  “They’ll stop you, right or wrong. You gotta face reality.”

  “Fuck reality. Who’s going to stop me? You?”

  “You’ve forgotten that you taught me everything you know, Harley. That makes you a superseded model.”

  “What you gotta worry about, Palenski, are the things I forgot to teach you.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like this, Harley.”

  “Oh yes it does. In fact, this is the only way it could be.”

  Harley, while he spoke, touched up Japan again and then straighten with a smile.

  “Well, look at that. Kev-baby’s found two more of them. You’re right. It is a good system.”

  “It’s an unbeatable system, Harley.”

  “Palenski, now there’s one of those things I must have forgot to teach you.”

  “What was that?”

  “It is in the nature of all systems that they will fail in the end.”

  *

  The temple was really only a platform with a few charred stone columns although those columns were massive, more like an Ancient Egyptian temple than something Japanese. The remarkable thing was that the columns still stood, while the rest of the structure had collapsed and its stones had been removed, probably for housing, centuries ago. But now it was just this pile of stones along one of the less used paths up Mt Fuji, about two thirds of the way to the summit. It had been in ruins long before the recent eruption.