by Mick Farren
"Is Dreisler involved in all this?"
Carlisle shook his head. "We have to assume that Dreisler's on our side."
The two detectives looked dubious. "You're not telling us everything."
Carlisle looked down at his hands. "No, I'm not. I don't know everything. I couldn't tell you if I wanted to."
Donahue was thoughtful. "Where does the brass stand in all this?"
Carlisle paused before answering. "They'll be one hundred percent if everything comes up roses. If it doesn't, it'll almost certainly be every man for himself."
That was actually very close to the truth. Even before Dreisler had let him go, he had been permitted to talk to Parnell. During a very stilted conversation, Parnell had intimated that the higher-ups in the PD knew of Dreisler's plan and would do nothing to stop or hinder them. They would throw in with his Committee of National Reconstruction if he was successful, but if he failed, they would put so much distance between him and themselves that it would seem as if he had the plague.
Reeves and Donahue looked at each other.
"So it's all down to us?" Reeves said. "If we win, we're heroes, and if we lose, we're dogmeat."
Carlisle nodded. "Dogmeat would look good in comparison." He leaned back in his chair. "You can bail out now."
There was a long silence. In the end, it was Reeves who again spoke for both of them. "What the hell, we'll go for it. If something isn't done about the deacons, they'll get us all soon enough."
Carlisle placed four diskettes on the desk. "These are the detailed orders for the individual squad leaders. On a more general level there are three things to remember. Make sure that the roof helipad is kept open and is under our control. That's vital. You should ignore the computers. There will be all manner of weird stuff coming up. The whole system will be virused to hell by the end of today. Don't trust the computers, and don't trust anyone you don't know."
"What levels of force do we use?" Reeves asked.
Carlisle looked him straight in the eye. "Whatever it takes."
Both Reeves and Donahue nodded. "Is that all?"
"I wish I had some encouraging speech to make. I don't. All I can tell you is that, one way or the other, it will all be over in a matter of hours. I pray that things will be better."
The two men seemed to sense his doubts. "Don't worry, Lieutenant, we're with you."
After they left, he sat for a long time in silence. Somewhere over the last few days he had lost some kind of innocence – or maybe it was his integrity. The last of it had finally banished during the conversation with Reeves and Donahue. He had deceived his own men, and he could no longer shelter behind the spotless shield of the honest cop. He was a conspirator just like the rest of them. Maybe not as tainted as Dreisler, but it was only a matter of degree.
He sighed and picked up the phone.
"Code 8971A Dragonfly," he said.
It had started.
Winters
Winters had never felt so alone. All his life he had been part of a team – in school, at college, and now in the service. There had always been people around him, comradeship and shared ambition. Since he had survived the attack of the Lefthand Path, he had become an outcast. Nobody spoke to him except in the course of duty, and his duties had dwindled to routine data shuffling. There was no point in telling the others that it was not his fault that he had been knocked unconscious instead of killed outright. They already knew that it was only his vows to the Magicians that kept him from reporting the incident, and they suspected that Carlisle was associated with the terrorists, but none of that seemed to make any difference. He had returned neither victorious nor on his shield. That was enough to make him a pariah. His recent hopes, encouraged by his summons to the Magicians and the implication that he was going to be asked to join their numbers, had been cruelly dashed. He could not see how he would ever recover from the disgrace. He had thought about trying to redeem himself by killing Carlisle, but the lieutenant seemed to be constantly guarded, ever since his mysterious return.
The only individual who showed any sign of being aware of Winters' situation was Senior Deacon Dreisler, and even he had not come through with the orders that he had talked about in the hospital. All he had heard from Dreisler was a cryptic message that he should be present at the Astor Place complex that Sunday and ready for any orders. Now it was Sunday, and he sat at his workstation, staring at a blank screen and waiting for a silent phone to ring. It occurred to him that it was probably just as well that he was not publicly linked with Dreisler. The senior deacon might well be the kiss of death to any plans Winters may have had to reinstate himself with his comrades. The purges that Dreisler had been conducting had made him the most feared and hated man in the service. Anyone connected with him and his department was looked on as an informer and a traitor.
The junior deacons' squad room was all but deserted. Almost everybody was on the streets. A few deacons came and went, but they had the air of men passing through on more important business. There were no greetings or reports of what was going on outside. They treated him as if he were invisible. At one point, Thomas had come in, looking as if he were about to speak; but then his face had stiffened and he walked out without a word.
The hours dragged by. One o'clock, two o'clock. His monitors remained strangely blank. He ran a function check, which told him that everything was working normally. There was just no data being fed in. Was there some sort of security blanket that no one had bothered to tell him about? When, at about three-thirty, the primary screen suddenly flashed into life, he almost started in his seat. There were just two words on the screen.
EMERGENCY OVERRIDE.
Winters leaned forward eagerly. The words remained on the screen for thirty seconds, and then they were replaced by a specific instruction.
ACTIVATE SCRAMBLER CODE 42.
He keyed in the code. The screen disintegrated into colored moire patterns for about fifteen seconds and then it cleared.
REPORT IMMEDIATELY TO THE BASEMENT ARMORY.
Winters' heart leapt. They did have a job for him after all. Perhaps he was not a total outcast. He was on his feet, buttoning his jacket.
As he was waiting for the elevator, live men in windbreakers and blue jeans turned into the corridor. They had machine pistols slung over their shoulders and they looked like PD detectives. What the hell were armed cops doing up here?
One of them called out to him. "Hey, you! Where do you think you're going? "
Winters looked around angrily. Who did they think they were? "Who wants to know?"
At that moment, the elevator door slid open. The PD men, if that was indeed what they were, quickened their pace. He swiftly stepped into the elevator car and thumbed the 'door close' button. The doors hissed shut and began to descend.
When he arrived at the armory, there were some twenty junior deacons assembled there, surly and more than a little confused. Winters received a few hostile glances, but nobody said anything. Thomas appeared to have taken charge.
"I've called you all down here because there seem to be some strange things going on in this building."
There were murmurs of agreement.
"Something is disrupting internal communication, and a number of channels to the outside are not responding. In addition to that, some of the surveillance cameras are down, but the ones that are left are showing armed groups of PD detectives patrolling the building, and there's no record of any authorization for this. Being of a curious disposition, I ran a check on the office of our friend Lieutenant Carlisle."
The name was greeted with catcalls.
"There's a bugscrambler being used down there."
The catcalls turned to angry muttering.
Thomas ignored the noise. "Accordingly, I suggest that we draw heavy weapons, divide into small groups, and conduct a systematic reconnaissance of the building."
A deacon called Erhardt raised his hand. "What do we do if we come across one of these groups of PD? "
<
br /> "We order them to return to their own areas pending a full investigation."
"And if they refuse?"
"That's why we're drawing heavy weapons."
Mansard
"Will you look at that? It's like something out of an old news-tape of Vietnam or Honduras. They ought to be playing 'Ride of the Valkyries.' "
The presidential aerocade was coming down the river, led by a pair of King David light attack helicopters, flicking from side to side across the width of the Hudson, close to the water, like giant mosquitoes. Behind them there were four old, solid Hueys, running straight ahead, line abreast. The president's big Nehemiah – Air Force Four – came next, flanked by a pair of Herod gunships. Four more Hueys brought up the rear. The official formation was also surrounded and followed by a dozen or more police helicopters and news choppers, which stood off at a respectful distance. The slap of their massed rotors was like the low rumble of distant thunder.
"Behold, the Lord cometh."
"Old Larry sure does like to make an entrance."
Charlie Mansard looked at his watch. It was four fifty-live. "Old Larry's ten minutes late."
Mansard was very conscious of time. The show was due to start at six. There was an hour of intro filler, the choir, the massed flagwavers and baton twirlers, the dancers, and the celebrity walk-ons. Faithful himself went on at seven. He would do an hour, and at exactly seven fifty, just as he was running up to the final climax, Mansard's people would light up the four-sky walkers, and the tugs would slowly move the barges upriver.
"Let's hope they haven't started screwing up the schedule."
Carlisle
Carlisle looked from the phone to the digital clock on his desk. It was two minutes before four. He had been doing the same thing for the last thirteen minutes. The signal should have come already. There was a icy liquid feeling in his stomach, and his shoulder muscles were threatening to cramp with tension. Was the whole thing going bad before it had even started? He was all too well aware that he did not stand a chance if Dreisler failed. He was doing his best to keep his imagination tamped down. The reverb helmet was all too vivid and recent in his memory.
"Come on, damn it."
The phone warbled, and he grabbed for it like a starving man grabbing fora crust. "Carlisle."
There was a synthivoice at the other end, only barely cutting through the hiss created by multiple scrambling. "The Vulture has landed."
That was it. The signal was clear. Larry Faithful was down on Liberty Island. The Dreisler plot was going ahead, and from that moment on there was absolutely no turning back. It was win – or lose everything. He broke the connection and keyed in a fresh code. The phone on the other end rang only once.
"Reeves." The detective sounded tense. He clearly had a good idea how far out on a limb they were, even if he did not know the real reasons.
"It's me, Carlisle. I just received the signal that I've been waiting for. It's time to go. Are you still in a position to seal all the entrances to the building?"
"Shield controls are right in front of me."
"So seal us in."
Still cradling the phone under his chin, Carlisle tapped a code into his computer. An image of the exterior of the main entrance came up on the primary screen while the smaller ones showed split screens of the other entrances. The two deacon guards outside the main doors spun around in amazement as the heavy steel shutters started to roll down. One of them drew his pistol. Carlisle wondered what the man intended to do. The shutters could stop a rocket attack. Neither of the men seemed to have the presence of mind to duck back inside before the shutters closed completely.
"Damn fools," Carlisle grunted.
Reeves was back on the line. "The shop's shut, Lieutenant."
"Okay. So send the one squad up to the roof and the other to the communications center. We need to secure them both as quickly as possible."
"Where will you be?"
"I'm coming down to communications with you. Meet me at the elevators."
Kline
It was four o'clock – time for Cynthia to load the final stage of the program. After that, her work would be done. Her instructions were to leave the building as quickly as possible and go to the Eastside Heliport where she would be contacted and, presumably, taken either to a safe house or out of the country altogether. She fed in the diskette. The primary screen flickered and a message appeared.
THIS PROGRAM HAS TO BE FED INTO THE MAIN ACCESS GRID IN SECTION C70. GO THERE IMMEDIATELY.
THE SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS ARE DOWN SO YOU WILL NOT BE DETECTED.
She thought about the gun in her handbag. Nobody had told her to come armed, but there had been such a strange atmosphere around the CCC complex for the last few days that she had decided to bring a token of personal insurance. She had felt a little trepidation about bringing the little palm gun through the weapon detectors in the lobby, but if anything was going to get past, it was the lightweight, plastic Browning. If she had really reached the end of her assignment, she had to be extremely careful. Since she had been kept so much in the dark, she had no way of telling what might be coming to a head in some other part of the operation. There was also the chance that one of her superiors had decided that she was expendable. It had happened before and would certainly happen again. When she had first volunteered for service in the United States, she had known that there was a chance she might be killed. If nothing else, the suicide cap in one of her back molars was a constant reminder. She did not intend to go without a struggle, however. As far as she was concerned, there were not many fates worse than death, and passive acceptance was a betrayal of the principles for which she was fighting.
She stood up and slipped the diskette into her pocket. There was only one other person in the section: Toni, who had also pulled duty for that crucial Sunday, was watching soap opera reruns on her primary screen. Most of the girls had wangled invitations to see the president. A number had also been transferred out to God knew where after their deacon boyfriends had been arrested by Internal Affairs. Cynthia concealed the Browning in the palm of her hand. In training camp, they had called it the princess pistol.
"I'm going to the little girls' room," she announced.
Toni did not even bother to look up from Tender Time. Cynthia left the work area and hurried down the corridor in the direction of the seventy section where the unfiltered landline link to Virginia Beach was housed. She wondered if Harry Carlisle was in the building. He had been acting so strange since he had come back from his week-long disappearance. They had talked on the phone, but he had been so tense and distant that she had become half convinced that he knew what she was.
She reached the entrance to C70. The empty corridors were very spooky. The complex was sinister enough when the corridors were bustling with the business of God and justice. Now, without the hurrying people, an aura of dread pervaded, as if something evil and threatening was lurking around every brightly lit corner.
C70 was a closed white door. As she walked up to it, a synthivoice made clear just how closed it was.
"This is a class A security area. Identify yourself and produce authority for access."
That seemed to be the end of her mission. Somebody somewhere had screwed up. There was no way that she could get into C70. She turned to go. The synthivoice stopped her dead.
"Your authority is accepted. Proceed."
The door slid open. Cynthia walked in. She had expected it to close behind her, but it did not. Feeling a little uncomfortable, she surveyed the room. It was large and white, bare except for the terminal against the far wall. Only twice in her life had she seen anything quite so complex. It had three tiers of keyboards, eight monitors, and even provision for DNI leads. Large letters were flashing on the central monitor.
READY TO LOAD – FEED ME.
She sat down in the workstation's large white leather chair, wondering who routinely used the thing. It had certainly not been designed for underlings. She fed in the disk.
The screens all lit up. A large cartoon vulture appeared on the primary screen. It lazily flapped it wings.
WAITING
The vulture flapped its wings once more, and then the screen cleared.
THE PROGRAM IS LOADED – THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUBMISSION.
She removed the diskette. It was time to get the hell out of there. She looked up from the monitor and, to her horror, saw Deacon Winters standing in the open doorway with a big Moss-berg pointed at her. The expression on his face was an unpleasant leer.
"So what do you think you're doing in here?"
Winters
Winters had been paired with a deacon called Gresler – John Wayne Gresler. He was a hard, pious, and, Winters suspected, brutal man. Promotion had passed him by, and he seemed content to remain a solid foot soldier in the battle against the forces of evil. Closed and silent, he had a face as yielding as a granite mountainside. Along with Winters, he had been assigned to C section. Everyone expected it to be a milk run. Although the surveillance cameras were out, a number of deacons had reported that there was only a handful of women up there. Winters and Gresler were to go up there and, as fast as possible, make certain that such was still the case, then use the override channel to get fresh orders. No one saw any reason to send a backup with them.
When they reached the floor, the two of them split up to check through the numbered work sections. It hardly seemed worth bothering. As predicted, the place was like a high-tech morgue. Winters was working his way down through the high seventies when he spotted something that was not quite as it should have been. The class A, ID only, security door to area C70 was jammed in the open position, and a red warning light was flashing on the wall above it. A class A door never remained open.
