“You copy?” he asked.
“Yes,” Otto’s voice came back in his earpiece. “Are you in place?”
“I’m here,” McGarvey said. “Stand by.”
With the door open he could hear Schlagel’s voice, but it was difficult to make out what the man was saying, because the speakers were all turned toward the crowd. He closed the heavy glass doors and the noises from outside were sharply muted, all but inaudible.
He opened the doors again. “Good enough,” he said. “We have a shot, I think.”
“Only if his ego is as big as we think it is,” Otto came back. “And you’ll have a feed to your cell phone when you need it.”
“Have you ever known a man in his position whose ego wasn’t off the chart?” McGarvey asked rhetorically. “Gail?”
“Here.”
“He’s on his way.”
“I can hear him, he’s getting close,” Gail radioed.
“You need to be obsequious.”
“I know the word, doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“Is Eric linked with us?” McGarvey asked Otto.
“Here,” Yablonski said from his computer center. “And I’ve known Gail a lot longer than you guys and I can tell you with near one hundred percent confidence that she might know the word, but there’s never been a subservient bone in her body.”
“Okay, people, showtime,” Otto broke in. “Gail, you ready?”
“I’m outside the hazmat tent, no suit,” Gail replied. “He just pulled up on the other side of the barrier, about fifty yards away. I’m on my obsequious way. As if any of you sexist pigs ever knew the meaning of the word.”
“Are you armed?” Yablonski asked.
“Negative. My magazine only holds seventeen rounds, not a hundred thousand. This is Kirk’s show not mine.”
McGarvey could hear the strain in her voice.
Schlagel was shouting something but his words were no less clear now than they had been earlier. But from McGarvey’s vantage point at the lobby doors he could make out the reverend’s figure standing above the heads of the vast crowd, the nervous National Guard troops who were already starting to edge away, and Gail in a light sweatshirt and jeans walking up the middle of A1A.
“I can’t make out what he’s saying,” McGarvey radioed.
“He’s thanking his faithful for making this important pilgrimage,” Gail said. “God’s righteous work. ‘Let it begin here and now.’”
Then Schlagel’s voice was being picked up by Gail’s comms unit, the microphone of which was concealed inside her NNSA dark blue windbreaker, but what he was saying made little or no sense to McGarvey, something about swift justice and then peace and bliss would cover the land as if “directed by a booming voice come down from the heavens.”
“Okay, I’m hearing him now,” McGarvey said. “Does he have a security detail?”
“Four of them. Looks like they know what they’re doing. Sharp.”
“He has to come in alone.”
“Reverend Schlagel!” Gail shouted. “Reverend!”
Someone yelled something that McGarvey couldn’t make out, and suddenly there was a lot of noise, more people shouting, and what sounded like scuffling, heavy breathing.
“Just a moment, just a moment!” Schlagel shouted.
“Gail Newby, National Nuclear Security Administration. Someone here from Washington needs to speak with you, sir. It’s extremely urgent.”
Gail’s comms unit was picking up other voices, but they were garbled, and McGarvey could only make out a word here and there, something about risk, no necessity, no reason for it.”
“I can personally guarantee your safety, sir,” Gail said.
Someone, maybe Schalgel, asked who it was.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“The hell with that.”
“He’s indirectly from the White House, sir. And as I said, this is extremely urgent. National importance. In fact he’s begging you for your help.”
“Nice touch,” McGarvey said.
“I’m not armed,” Gail said. “Besides the National Guard is here along with the media. You’d be perfectly safe.”
“Where is this meeting to be held?” Schalgel asked, his voice suddenly clear.
“The lobby of the South Service Building,” Gail said. “You’d have to wear a hazmat suit, but the radiation is minimal, and the meeting will only take a minute or two.”
“This representative from President Lord is waiting for me now?”
“He took the bait,” Otto said.
“Yes, sir,” Gail said. “He arrived just a few minutes ago, aboard a National Guard helicopter. You might have seen it.”
Schlagel’s voice became indistinct again, mixed with other urgent voices, but it was clear enough in McGarvey’s earbud that the reverend was arguing with his minders. And it only lasted for a minute.
“I have a sermon to finish, so let’s make this quick,” Schlagel said.
“Just this way, sir, to the decontamination tent,” Gail said.
Someone else had taken up the microphone and was speaking to the crowd now, though McGarvey could no longer make out what was being said as Gail and Schlagel headed past the barrier.
“Okay, he’s taken the bait,” Otto said. “Mac, are you set?”
“Yes, but don’t enable the links until ten seconds after you hear me say, I’ll close the doors.”
“Roger that.”
McGarvey watched from the relative darkness just inside the lobby but it seemed to take forever before Gail and Schlagel appeared on the roadway and went into the decontamination tent. And even longer before the reverend, dressed in a full hazmat suit, came out alone and without hesitation strode across A1A and through the main gate.
“Okay, showtime,” McGarvey said. He pulled on his hood and stepped outside.
Schlagel pulled up short about ten yards away, maybe sensing that something was wrong. “Who are you?” he shouted.
“I’ll explain inside!” McGarvey shouted back.
“Why here, like this?”
“Privacy, Reverend. No one will bother us here.”
Schlagel didn’t like the situation, it was clear from his suddenly tense body language. He looked back the way he had come, and he half turned.
“Please,” McGarvey said, letting a trace of fear creep into his voice. “Sir, I’m begging you, on behalf of the president. Just hear me out. My God, you can’t begin to realize how important this is.”
“To me?”
“For the entire nation,” McGarvey said. “Only you can help now.”
Schlagel hesitated a moment longer, but then as McGarvey had counted on, his ego got the better of his judgment and he came the rest of the way. “I’m all ears,” he said. “Whoever the hell you are.”
At the steps he turned and waved to his people, and then followed McGarvey inside.
“Thank you, sir,” McGarvey said. “I’ll close the doors, so we’ll have a little more privacy.”
“If you think it’s necessary,” Schalgel said.
When the doors were closed, McGarvey turned around, took off his hood, and dropped it on the floor.
“You’re live,” Otto said.
Schlagel was taken aback at first, but then he took off his hood and smiled, almost in admiration. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “Lord didn’t send you. This is one of your schemes. And what now? Are you going to shoot me?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” McGarvey said.
“Glad to hear it,” Schlagel said, still amused. “But, if you don’t mind, my people are waiting for me.”
“Your choice, Mr. Deutsch, but you might want to stick around for a couple of minutes, just to hear me out.”
Schlagel was suddenly wary, but not concerned. “Now that’s a name I haven’t heard for a very long time.”
“We have your background in Milwaukee, as well as your real service record — cigarettes, gambling, sex.”
“Youthfu
l indiscretions, along with my arrest and incarceration in California. All of which brought me face-to-face with Jesus Christ our Savior, who I took into my soul and to whom I promised my life’s works.”
“Including the Marinaccio Group in Dubai?”
Schlagel said nothing.
“It’s an oil futures hedge and derivative fund and you know the woman who runs it. Anne Marie Marinaccio.”
“Never heard the name.”
“Then you probably don’t know that she and two of her people were assassinated last night,” McGarvey said. “No one knows what’s to become of her holdings.”
“It has nothing to do with me.”
“You’re heavily invested in the fund, to the tune of at least fifty million dollars, probably a lot more. We know that much. We even have your account numbers. Your ministry’s funds. Your church and network are big, but that’ll be a major hit.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Schlagel said. “Nothing but a cheap trick, a smear campaign. And all this time I thought the bastard in the Oval Office was above this kind of crap.”
“I think we can come up with the names of a number of mistresses and whores you’ve been involved with over the past few years.”
Schlagel looked over his shoulder, but then shook his head. “In the past, before I took Jesus into my heart,” he said.
“Offshore accounts in the Caymans and Channel Islands.”
“Liar,” Schlagel said.
“How about the International Bank of Commerce in Dubai? You have money there, too.”
“If you had any proof of that sort of nonsense you would have turned it over to the FBI by now. Lord would have made sure of it.”
“Did you know that the bank funds terrorist groups like al-Quaeda? I wonder what your faithful flock would say if they knew.”
“Listen to me, you prick, if you and your pals in the Bureau had any proof you would have arrested me by now.”
“Maybe you should take a look at this,” McGarvey said and he opened his cell phone and held it up. “Orlando, Mariott, last night.” The prostitute Otto had arranged was twenty-three but she looked sixteen, and the hidden cameras the techs from Special Projects had set up caught everything in high-def living color; including the reverend, the girl, and the sounds of their sex, which at one point had gotten a little rough, almost so much so that Otto had been about to order the girl be rescued.
Schlagel didn’t care. “The recording was fabricated, so go ahead and show it to whoever you want. But let me tell you shit like that is done all the time. Christ, we even have the facilities for parlor tricks like that and a lot more out at McPherson. What do you think we are, a bunch of Kansas Bible Belt hicks? But you did hit the nail on the fucking head when you called them my ‘faithful flock,’ because that’s exactly what they are. Faithful, because I molded them that way, and a flock of sheep because that’s how I lead the dumb bastards.”
“It can’t be easy, being in the spotlight like that.”
“You can’t imagine how easy it is.”
McGarvey nodded. “I have to hand it to you, Reverend, you’re good. But if you mean to get those people out there excited enough to storm this place a lot of them could get hurt.”
“If one hundred die tonight, if one thousand are wounded and horribly maimed either by radiation or by National Guard bullets, it will only advance my cause.”
“Your cause?”
“Prove to the world that I alone have the vision to take us out of this terrible mess we’re in.”
“And you think your flock will believe it?”
“They’ll believe anything I tell them,” Schlagel said.
McGarvey went to the doors and threw them open. “Then go, Reverend, tell them,” he said, and someone had turned one of the loudspeakers around, so his voice echoed off the side of South Service. Along with the moans and cries of the prostitute and Schlagel’s grunts.
“What?” Schlagel said, his voice booming. “You son of a bitch,” he said, his words rolling over the crowd. “Lies!” he shouted, brushing past McGarvey and walking out the door to his waiting flock.
EPILOGUE
One Year Later
Tents had been set up in the visitors center’s parking lot at the Hutchinson Island power station and more than two hundred and fifty dignitaries from Sunshine State Power & Light; county and state governments, plus Washington, D.C. — including a sprinkling of influential green congressmen who in the beginning had been dead set against Eve’s project because of the tremendous costs and the possible bad effects on the earth’s climate, unintended consequences indeed — a few from Princeton, among them all of Eve’s team; from NASA, including Krantz; from Commerce and DOE, including Caldwell, and even Vice President Robert Holden was there, as well as the Committee of Six for the Ethical Treatment of the Planet, and celebrities from Hollywood — some of the top movie stars, actually — were all there waiting for sunset, and for the switching on ceremony. Power from the impellers in the Gulf Stream would be sent ashore along the underwater cable where it would pass through the station’s transformer yard and from there out to the Eastern Interconnect.
McGarvey was looking out at the crowd seated in the tent and Gail came over. “Hi, Kirk. I’m happy you could make it back for this.”
McGarvey smiled. He was weary but not tired. The last year, alone in his house on the Greek island of Seriphos, had been a time of healing, he supposed. But it hadn’t really worked the way he’d wanted it to. The days had passed, but far too slowly for his liking. His wife, Katy, would have told him to get on with it. “Stop moping, Kirk. It’s not becoming.”
And now, he wondered, what was next? “Wouldn’t have missed it,” he said.
“It’ll mean tons to our lady scientist.”
McGarvey smiled inwardly. Gail had gone from referring to Eve as “his lady scientist,” to “our lady scientist,” mostly because of what the three of them had gone through together. But in a good part, he thought, because Gail had finally accepted the likelihood that he would never set up house with either of them. Eve had her work on the project, and Gail was head of field training for the NNSA. Both of them were busy and McGarvey had dropped out.
“I haven’t seen her yet,”he said. “How is she?”
“Nervous. She hates public speaking, you know. Especially since Vanessa. She keeps going around saying, ‘The damned thing works,’ as if she’s had her doubts all along.”
“But it does.”
“This part at least,” Gail said. “But she says it’ll be at least ten years before enough impellers are online to see if there’s any effect on the Gulf Stream and on the Atlantic temperature distribution. That’s the key.”
Schlagel was gone, totally dropped out of sight, his ministry and SOS network all but defunct. DeCamp had disappeared, dead for all anyone knew, and the Marinaccio Group had been absorbed into Dubai’s finance ministry in the form of taxes, though a court battle was looming between the Emirates, her investors, many of them Saudi royalty, and the U.S. government. Everyone wanted a piece of the action.
“Then she’ll have to wait and see.”
“Anyway, when did you get here?”
“About an hour ago,” McGarvey said. “I wanted a chance to look around.”
Gail gave him a nervous look. “And?”
“Everything looks fine,” McGarvey said. “And when this is done, I’m taking you to dinner.”
“Can you handle two hyper women at the same time?” Eve asked, coming around the corner, a big, though nervous, grin on her face.
She and McGarvey embraced. “I don’t know if I can handle one of you, so I suppose it won’t make any difference if it’s both.”
“I missed you,” Eve said.
McGarvey shook his head. “Nice of you to say so, Doc, but you’ve been too busy.”
“The name is Eve. Now I have a speech to make, a switch to throw, and some hands to shake, so neither of you go anywhere until I’m
done.”
McGarvey smiled. “The damned thing works.”
The oddest expression came over Eve’s face, and her lips pursed for just a second, but then she smiled and nodded, too. “Yup, the damned thing works. And it better after all we’ve gone through, and still have to go through, because we’re hanging on the edge of an abyss at the bottom of which is nothing but darkness. Maybe even death.”
“Dramatic,” Gail said.
“No, not at all,” Eve replied bleakly even though she was smiling. “We either fix things now within the next decade, or it’ll be too late.”
Abyss, indeed, McGarvey thought, as Eve walked to the podium to give her speech and turn the switch.
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