The Edge of Ruin

by Melinda Snodgrass

  Danny looked to Franklin, who looked to Richard. Her brother nodded. A few keystrokes and the screen went dark. Syd looked over at Richard. It was strange for Pamela to see people looking to her brother for guidance.

  “Richard, do you suppose people like me and Sam, people who’ve been touched with the sword—do you think we could go in?” Syd asked.

  “The sword doesn’t make you brave. It just makes you sane,” Richard said gently.

  “And if you’re sane you’ll probably want to run away from the monsters,” Sam added. This time there wasn’t even a titter of gallows laughter from the people in the room.

  Richard looked seriously up at Franklin and Syd, then swept the assembled agents with an intense blue-eyed gaze. “And while they can’t feed on you after you’ve been touched, or use you to power their magic, they can kill you.”

  Franklin laid a hand on Richard’s shoulder and addressed the people filling the room. “Look, the director’s AWOL. We’re getting orders out of Justice that are just plain nuts. I saw what this sword did for Syd.”

  Syd grabbed his daughter and pulled her forward. “And Sam.”

  For an instant the young agent hesitated, then grudgingly admitted, “Yeah, he … it fixed me.”

  “Well, I’m going to do it,” Franklin resumed. “Anybody else want to join me?” He looked around. There were confirming nods from everyone.

  Richard had the hilt of the sword in his hand. The room went very quiet. People watched him with varying degrees of skepticism, fear, and dread. He drew the sword, and skepticism vanished. Pamela leaned back against the wall and felt her shoulder blades grate against a framed plaque. Each time the sword was drawn now the musical overtones became deeper, stronger, and more resonant.

  Pamela had now gone past tired to total exhaustion. Not because it was after eleven at night but because of fear. What she had seen sapped her, and turned her worldview to chaos. She wanted to get this over with, go back to the condo and hide under the comforter. But somebody had to do it. It had to be said.

  “Richard,” she called sharply. He looked over at her. “What about the children?”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  RICHARD

  The water in the swimming pool was bathtub warm. Pretty soon my strokes had slowed, and I was taking a breath every two strokes instead of every four. Only the pain as my wound pulled and tugged kept me awake.

  The hilt hung on a lanyard around my neck, and it felt like it was trying to drag me to the bottom. Man falls asleep in swimming pool. Drowns. Film at eleven.

  And the sword would be the thing that tipped the balance. I tried not to read significance into the thought.

  Back home I would have left it rolled up in a towel. But not here. Here it was never leaving me.

  Pamela had fallen asleep in the car on the drive back from Franklin’s. Even her terror over Sam’s breakneck driving style hadn’t been able to keep her awake. One particularly fast turn sent her falling against me. I had clasped an arm around her shoulders to steady her, and had the disorienting sense of protectiveness. Who knows, maybe some day we’d actually like each other.

  Whoa, let’s not go too far here.

  I kicked harder. The sound of the churning water was both muffled and hollow in the echoing, tile-lined room. We’d gotten back to the condo at 1:00 A.M., but my sleep had been disturbed by the memory of crying children. The adults had experienced the sword, so they knew how much it would hurt, but most hadn’t been discouraged. Only one woman had refused, saying she didn’t want to deny her child his dreams and imagination. She had taken her son and left.

  Her argument had actually shaken me. Maybe kids did need pretend games and imaginary friends to develop normally. What if the sword took that away? I didn’t understand this weapon, and the man … creature who could have enlightened me was well out of reach. Which left me relying on my own judgment, and my choices so often sucked. Fortunately, Franklin was made of sterner stuff. He shrugged off the woman’s objections as dumb. “Hell, I can still imagine. In fact I can imagine a whole hell of a lot. More than I’d like.”

  I had warned that he might not feel that way when his children were crying in pain. But again Franklin had brushed if off. “It can’t be any worse than a vaccination for school, and this is more important than a damn shot for whooping cough.”

  So, in addition to reassuring me, the conversation had also provided me with a way to describe what happened when I used the sword. Being inoculated. It beat every other phrase people had come up with. When Cross called it “the touch” it sounded sleazy. When Pamela called it “submitting to the sword” it sounded like an S&M sex act. Dagmar had suggested “the dubbing,” but that was even worse. “Inoculated” worked.

  I tucked, somersaulted, caught the side of the pool with my feet, and pushed off again. Estevan’s shadow fell across the water. What a life—rich as hell, and I had to be guarded around the clock. Boy, that’s living. The deep end seemed a long, long way away. The muscles across my shoulders and down my triceps shivered with effort. It was time to admit defeat. I sidestroked over to the ladder, pulled off my goggles, and climbed out.

  Estevan held out a towel. I dried off. Next he held my robe. It felt so odd to have people waiting on me. I muttered a thank you, and we left the pool and gym area and headed for the elevators. It was inevitable. It was karma. It was kismet. We met Shih Tzu Man and his dog on the elevator. He was clutching a long pooper-scooper, and he treated us to his usual glare. The little dog seemed to be calming down about us. She just sniffed our ankles. Though Estevan looked like he wanted to drop-kick the little thing. The dog looked up at him. He looked down at her, and she reverted to form. She backed up against her owner’s legs and started yapping. Naturally that was when my cell phone started to buzz and vibrate. I pulled it out.

  “Oort.”

  “This is Senator Aldo’s office.”

  “What?”

  “Aldo, Senator Aldo.”

  Holy shit! Aldo. The senator from Nebraska held no official leadership position, but his influence went wide and deep. He was one of those figures the American people, whether Democrat, Republican, Independent, or Apathetic, seemed to embrace. Members of his own party deferred to him, the loyal opposition feared him, and the president heeded him. He sat on the Intelligence Committee and Foreign Relations, and he chaired the Armed Services Committee. It meant he’d most likely been briefed about conditions at the gate. The fact that he was calling me was significant.

  “The senator would like to see you tomorrow at eleven A.M. in his office. Can you be there?”

  “Yes. I’ll be there.”

  * * *

  Both Grenier and my father told me that Senator Aldo had the same office that John Kennedy had occupied back in the 1950s. It was appropriate. Both Kennedy and Aldo had been military men. Both were Liberals. Both entered Congress in their early thirties. Where they differed was in ambition and background. Aldo had chosen to stay in Congress rather than run for president, and he had not come from wealth. He had grown up on a farm, and watched a way of life vanish under pressure from corporate farming. In his autobiography he’d written that the experience had killed his father and shattered the family. All of it combined to make him a fierce defender of the common man.

  Grenier had also told me that Aldo valued courage and independence, so I arrived solo. Well, solo was a relative term—Joseph, Rudi, and Estevan waited with the limo in one of the underground parking garages. I’d met a lot of politicians over the years, dated their daughters, seduced a few of them, and even slept with a couple of their sons. Politicians, simply by virtue of being politicians, held no mystery or awe for me, but I still wished my father had come along. The judge’s calm gravitas would have been so much more effective than I could ever be.

  I was reflecting on all of this as I walked down the hall. The three-beat rhythm of my footfalls and the awkward swing of the cane added to my nervousness. The hilt had been mounted on top of the cane so it w
ouldn’t cause any problem when I went through security. We knew it registered as inert, but it would have seemed too strange to have had it in my pocket. It did overbalance the cane, however, and made it hard to control. The fact that my palm was sweat-slick with nerves didn’t help either.

  At the far end of the hall a group of tourists clustered around a portrait. As a cop I had been trained in situational awareness. I never entered a room without checking out every person in it, and I always got seated where I could watch people entering and leaving—even if I had to use a mirror to do it. Which meant I noticed the gaggle of tourists. I noticed the swing of long black hair, and the light glittering off the line of earrings running from the tips of her ears to the lobes. She had also been much on my mind during the intervening weeks since our last meeting in that dell in Virginia. Rhiana. I wasn’t hallucinating; she was actually here.

  I tightened my grip on the hilt and stopped, waiting for whatever might be thrown at me. But she didn’t do anything. The tour was moving again. As they disappeared around a corner, she glanced back at me from beneath the brim of her fur hat. I made a hobbling run down the hall and spun around the corner. The tourists were still moving, the sound of shuffling feet and winter coughs loud in the enclosed space. They were all large, pallid, and older. A beautiful girl in a sable coat was not among them. I remembered when Grenier had vanished into a crack in a wall in a church in Colorado Springs. Rhiana had her own way of escaping.

  As I retraced my steps I tried to comfort myself that there was more than one senator on this floor. They wouldn’t know I’d been to see Aldo … I stopped myself. Of course they would know. There were appointment calendars and sign-in sheets, and—I glanced down at the white tag pasted to my label—and badges issued.

  Secrecy was never going to work for us. If anything, we needed more transparency, more light shined on what was actually happening to our world. I pushed open the door into the senator’s outer office. I was going to have to warn him that meeting with me might endanger his life. Yeah, that was going to go over well.

  The staff didn’t make me wait. Moments later I was in Aldo’s personal office. I was surprised when Aldo left the power position behind the desk and indicated a pair of deeply upholstered chairs clustered around a low coffee table. We sat down, and for a long moment we just looked at each other. Fortunately, quiet had never bothered me. I’ve never felt the need to rush into conversation, and it gave me the time to study the man. Even in repose Aldo was an imposing figure. Six foot four, with broad, thick shoulders, and a neck as wide as his ears. Despite his age he hadn’t run much to fat. I glanced over at the Heisman Trophy on the bookcase, and the framed Silver Star that hung above it. Suddenly I felt very intimidated by this man. Why on earth would he listen to me?

  Aldo leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled before his face. “So, the message made this sound like the fate of the nation was hanging in the balance, and you were our only hope.” The talking heads on the news channels described him as blunt rather than charming. They weren’t kidding.

  I felt my face flame with embarrassment, and my knee began jiggling nervously. I didn’t think that would impress the senator, so I laid my hand on it, trying to hold it still. “Well, I wouldn’t … I don’t know who phrased it quite … well, it’s half true.”

  “Which half?”

  “Oh, come on, sir. You didn’t actually think I’d say the second half, did you?”

  A smile split the craggy angles of his face. “You’d be surprised. Politics is an egomaniac’s game.”

  “First, I’m not a politician. Second … you are.”

  A rumbling chuckle shook the barrel chest. “Touché. Fortunately for you I know your father. Six years ago Judge Oort and I joined forces on an amicus brief in a gay adoption case coming before the Supreme Court, and worked together to oppose presidential signing statements. I respect your father, and somehow I don’t think his son would be a liar.”

  “I’m not, sir,” I said.

  “So what is it you want to tell me?” Aldo asked.

  I caught the piercing gleam in his brown eyes, and suddenly I knew what to do. “I don’t need to tell you anything, sir. You’re on the Intelligence Committee. You’ve seen the satellite images. You know this goes way beyond a foiled plot to detonate a nuke. This is much, much worse.”

  He leaned slowly back in his chair. “Those are classified. One call and I could put you in a world of hurt.”

  “And I can say I never saw those damn images. Remember, I was there when the gate first opened.”

  “A gate. Why do you call it that?”

  “Because it’s an opening through which an invading army is entering, and the government isn’t doing squat. What’s happening in Virginia and Jerusalem and India requires a unified and international response.” I couldn’t sit still. I jumped up and started pacing. “It may be there’s a military solution to what’s happening, but whatever action we take, it needs to be coordinated and guided from the highest levels. This isn’t something the governor, the state police, or the National Guard can handle. America is the last superpower. The President has to act. I need to get in to see him. You’re the man who can make that happen.”

  Aldo lowered his hands and began beating out a rhythm on the arms of the chair, while his big, square-jawed head swiveled slowly, assessing the pictures on the wall. I followed his gaze. Most of them were photos of the senator with five different presidents.

  After a long moment he looked back at me. “Initially the FBI supported your position, but they’ve backed off that, and now they’re in agreement with the NSA and Langley.”

  “And what might the NSA and Langley be saying?” I asked.

  Aldo’s lips never parted when he smiled. The corners of his mouth just stretched, making his cheeks more prominent. “That’s classified.”

  Frustration can have an actual taste. I clenched my hands and gritted my teeth, trying to hold back the profanity.

  “Yeah, it makes you crazy, doesn’t it?” the senator said softly. “Look, I can tell you this much. Lobbing a bomb into an area where guns, radios, cameras, and so forth don’t work wouldn’t be all that effective.”

  “Meaning they tried it,” I said, and I sat back down.

  Aldo just smiled again. “But of course a place where weapons don’t operate would have some really interesting applications for a government that understood and controlled that technology.”

  This time I couldn’t keep control. The words burst out, hot and intemperate. “It’s not technology! It can’t be controlled. And any moron who tries is going to end up dead or worse.”

  “There’s a worse?”

  “Oh, yeah. And these things that are pouring through the gates are going to prove that to us.”

  Suddenly Aldo leaned forward. He was so tall that he came almost completely across the coffee table. His face was inches from mine. I could smell the breath mint he’d chewed. “And why should I believe you over all these other people and agencies?”

  It was something I’ve had to learn; it was not my nature to get in people’s faces. But I was a cop, and if there was one thing we knew it was how to push back. I leaned forward, and was surprised when Aldo retreated. I pursued the advantage, saying, “Because I’ve come here at no small personal risk to offer my help. I could have stayed in New Mexico, and been safe for a little while longer. But sooner or later it will be everywhere. It will cover the world. Unless we do something.”

  Aldo leaned back in his chair and regarded me for a long, long time. “What do you do, son?”

  The question surprised me, and I answered instinctively. “I’m a policeman.”

  “I thought you were the head of Lumina Enterprises.”

  “I’m that, too, but …” I pulled out my badge case, opened it, and studied the badge. The light from the ceiling fixture gleamed on the gold shield. The hilt, perched precariously atop the cane, leaned heavily against my knee. and for one strange, distorting moment th
e shield seemed to expand until it filled my sight, blotting out the room.

  I was jerked back to the moment when a hand fell heavily onto my shoulder. Aldo was looming over me, holding a glass of water.

  “Here.”

  “Thank you.” I took a sip. Clearly lack of sleep was catching up with me.

  “Well, you’re not telling me everything. Not by a long way,” the senator said. He paused. The silence was excruciating. Then he suddenly added, “But that can wait until we sit down with the President.”

  I nearly spilled the water in my haste to set aside the glass and stand. “You’ll do it? You’ll get me in?”

  “Can you tell us why people are losing their minds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell us what these things are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell us how to fight them?”

  “Yes.”

  I hoped my bravura performance was enough to hide the fact that my final answer was a lie.

  “You’ll be ready to go at any time?” Aldo asked as he moved back to his desk.

  “Day or night.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  It was dismissal. I hesitated at the door, then looked back.

  “Sir.” He looked up from the papers he was reading. “By helping me you’re putting yourself at risk, too. Be careful, okay?”

  “Always am.”

  Yeah, but you don’t know that one of them was in the hall outside your office. That they can walk through walls. That they can use magic against you because I wasn’t able to inoculate you. Because that really would have been a bridge too far.

  I let myself out and went limping through the outer office. It was humming with activity. I noted that the senator’s staff tended to be young and passionate. At one desk a couple of staffers were reviewing legislation. At a corner table a trio of young women shook letters out of a mailbag.

  As I passed the receptionist’s desk, she looked up and gave me a white-toothed smile. Her perfectly coiffed and sprayed hair didn’t move.