The Military Air Transport Service counter was six deep in soldiers, sailors, and marines; hundreds more sat or slept on the benches. Wigner did not feel out of place. His ID said he was William Coules, a logistics consultant with the Defence Department, and therefore part of the family. He patiently took his turn, got his boarding pass, and went off to find a seat in the waiting room.
It turned out to be next to a young Black sergeant with infantry insignia on the lapels of his uniform and three Venezuela ribbons on his chest.
“You’ve seen some action,” Wigner said.
“Some.”
“Where you headed for now?”
“California.”
“Good duty.”
“Shit. Kickin’ ass in L.A., keepin’ the brothers from rippin’ off food for their babies. Shit duty.”
“Things’d be worse without you.”
The young sergeant looked cynically at him. “Things’d be worse for you, my man.” He picked up a discarded newspaper and began to read.
So the troops were indeed restless. Anecdotal evidence, but still of some value. He looked around the terminal and saw more evidence: a marine obviously high on cocaine, jabbering cheerfully with a woman clerk who ignored him; a master sergeant with a thousand-yard stare and a cigarette burning slowly toward his lips; two air force officers glaring around the waiting room and muttering angrily together.
Getting dicey, thought Wigner. When the military figures the civilians can’t hack it any more, it’s dicey. They’ll try a coup in a few more months. Beat’em or join’em?
At last his flight was called. Over two hundred people straggled to the departure lounge and then to the aging 747. Wigner found a seat near the tail, and when the plane was in the air and most of the passengers were asleep, he sat in darkness and went through the reports with his flickreader.
The plane skipped across the country from one military airfield to another. After a while, Wigner finished his work and went to sleep. It was well past dawn when he got up and stepped out onto the rain-wet tarmac of Mountain Home.
Pierce was in the kitchen fixing himself lunch: a corned beef sandwich on caraway rye with hot mustard, sauerkraut, a green salad. The doorbell rang. He went to answer it and found a stocky young man standing there. The man stood with an easy erectness that reminded Pierce of someone he’d seen in old movies — Gene Kelly, that was it. Otherwise, though, the stranger was far from striking. Brown hair and eyes, a moustache no doubt intended to make him look older but that only made him look young. Unmemorable, unless you looked in his eyes and recognized the humour and intelligence in them.
“Good morning, Colonel Pierce. May I come in?”
“Of course.” Annoying that the man should know his name. “You can join me for lunch.”
“At 8:30 in the morning?”
“Middle of the day for me. Make you breakfast if you prefer.”
They were in the kitchen now, the stranger casually dropping his raincoat and shoulder bag over the back of a chair and then settling into it like a roommate back from an all-night party. He was wearing brown wool slacks, a white shirt, and a beige cardigan. He was not merely stocky, Pierce saw: the man had the shoulders of a weightlifter as well as a dancer’s poise.
“Actually, it’s closer to lunch than breakfast for me. That sandwich looks good.”
Pierce nodded and made another one. He popped a couple of beer cans and they sat down companionably.
“My name is Eric Wigner. Hi.” They shook hands. “I’m a fan of yours, Colonel Pierce.”
“My goodness,” said Pierce dryly.
“I work for the CIA in New York. Research Services Division.”
“I’m not aware of it.”
“I’d be crushed if you were. We do most of the Agency’s domestic surveillance. I ran across you in the files a few days ago.”
“Indeed.”
Pierce kept his face calm, interested, a little amused. Wigner reflectively bit into his sandwich, chewed, and sighed.
“You know, I rehearsed what I was going to say, but now Pm not so sure. I need to get on frank terms with you, and I need us to trust one another. So, I’ll tell you right off that I think you killed Donald Dwayne White.”
Pierce looked at him and smiled. He had a good smile, cheerful and infectious, and Wigner smiled back in response.
“You’re Trainable, of course?”
“Alpha-10. Not as good as you. I don’t think there are more than fifty Alpha-18s in North America.”
“Assume that I had killed White. Why would you care?”
“Because it tells me that you’re serious about what you’re doing here, and you’re prepared to do what needs to be done.”
“What I’m doing here, as you must know, is a holding action. Most Trainables I know give us two years, maybe three.”
“Back east we’re even more pessimistic. A coup by next spring, then a civil war and mass starvation. Just like Mexico.”
“All the more reason to wonder why you’re interested in one death in Idaho.”
“The death is only part of what I’m interested in. I’m looking for Trainables with guts and brains. You got rid of a bad guy by killing him yourself. Guts. You got rid of the Jack Mormons by understanding their weaknesses and thinking fast. Brains. You broke up the Wabbies by good intelligence and planning. Guts and brains.”
“Shucks,” said Pierce.
“You still have to learn how to take compliments.”
“I still have to learn a lot about you.”
“Check me out.” Wigner pulled a laminated plastic card from his wallet.
“Finish your sandwich.”
They carried their beers into the living room and Pierce put the card in the Polymath. “Boot, Polly.”
“Sure, Jerry.”
“Test the input for authenticity.”
“Authenticity is confirmed. For security reasons, Jerry, I can’t vocalize or copy any data from this input, and you’ll have to confirm that only authorized persons are present when I display data from this input.”
“Confirm, Polly. Run from Frame 1.”
Frame 1 was a marriage license issued almost thirty years earlier to Woodrow Wilson Wigner and Olivia Thompson. The screen flicked through Wigner’s documentation: birth certificate, medical records, school report cards, personal correspondence, Agency dossiers, passport, Training transcripts. Several photographs portrayed Wigner at various ages and in various settings: summer camp in the Catskills, a wedding reception in Georgetown, on the baseball team at Lawrenceville, at a freshman beer blast at Yale. Three Agency psychological profiles asserted his emotional stability, dedication to duty, self-confidence, and willingness to take risks.
“Thanks, Polly,” Pierce said. He took the card from the computer and returned it to Wigner.
“Stable and dedicated CIA personnel don’t go off making friends with suspected killers.”
“I wouldn’t have the nerve to if I weren’t stable and dedicated.”
“You’re at a disadvantage with me, Eric.”
“I know.”
“You think you have a use for me. I have no use for you.”
“Oh, well — a friend in the Agency is always of some use, but you’re right. I need someone like you who’s capable of killing when necessary. And knowing when killing isn’t necessary. You need only to protect your people.”
“Fair enough.”
“You know you can’t protect them much longer. You know it. So what I can offer you is a chance — just a chance — to protect them when all other protection is gone.”
“How?”
“I’m setting up a network of people around the country, people who can take charge before we go right down into civil war. Most of them have to be military or government. They all have to be Trainables. When the breakup comes, they’ll be ready. They’ll have the supplies, the support, enough to keep things going in their own bailiwicks. They’ll succeed at first when everyone else is failing, so
they’ll go on succeeding.”
“A shadow government.”
“Nice phrase.”
“Of Trainable kids. With no experience.”
“What’s experience got to do with anything? Experience just gives us anecdotal evidence for our personal prejudices. Trainables operate on a wider database.”
“Fair enough. It still sounds like sedition.”
“No. The system is wearing out, breaking down. I can’t give my loyalties to a dead abstraction, not when live people need me. I serve the state only because it serves the people. When the state can’t serve any longer, I have to find another way to. So do you.”
“What odds do you give your network?”
“Very poor ones. But better than sitting back and letting things fall apart.”
“How big is your network?”
Wigner grinned. “When you join, it doubles in size.”
Pierce laughed in spite of himself. “Finish your beer,” he said. “You can come on patrol with me this morning.”
They spent the next two days talking, drinking, traveling around the district. Wigner sat in anonymously on an interrogation of LeRoy Krebbs, one of the Wabbies. Like the others arrested at the march, Krebbs had said almost nothing. In fifteen minutes, however, Wigner got Krebbs to identify two major figures in the Wabbies’ national organization. Pierce put the word out on them and they were picked up within two hours by the FBI in Montana and Texas.
“You’re wasted in front of a computer,” Pierce told him.
“So are you. Do you want something better than this?”
“Not until you’ve got something better to offer.”
“I’ll work on it.”
Pierce paused for a moment. “You need more people for your network. I can give you some.”
“Who?”
Pierce showed him the bulletin board, identified the major contributors.
“I don’t know how many meet your needs. But it’s a start.”
Wigner, sitting on the Naugahyde couch, looked at the flashing screen of the Polymath. “Jerry — I understand what this means to you. You don’t betray your people. Neither do I. I’ll recruit the ones we need and leave the rest alone. No one’s going to suffer because of this. No one.”
“Good,” said Pierce. He looked into Wigner’s eyes and saw the friend he had needed for a long time.
Unseasonably early snow was coming down in little halos around the street lights. Pierce, in sweater and jeans, parked the Plymouth and walked around the comer. The neighbourhood was only half a mile from Donald Dwayne White’s house, but these houses were in better repair, their yards neater. Huge willows shadowed the sidewalks.
Enjoying the stings of the snowflakes on his face, Pierce strode up the walk to an old frame house behind a pair of aspens. She rented the main floor of the two-storey house, he knew, and no one lived upstairs at the moment. He knocked.
“Who is it?” a woman asked behind the door.
“Jerry Pierce. Is that Doria Killarney?”
After three locks turned, the door opened. She was wearing the same sweater she’d had on during the Wabbie protest, but her hair hung loose across her shoulders.
“What are you doing here?”
“Visiting, if it’s not a bad time. I’m sorry I didn’t call first.”
“Come on in.”
Doria led him into a small, curtained living room, sparsely furnished and lined with board-and-brick bookcases. A book lay open on the arm of an easy chair: Stephen Jay Gould’s classic The Mismeasure of Man.
“Please sit down, Colonel. I’m just making tea.”
Pierce settled in a rattan chair, skimming the titles of the books. Good taste, if a little too much nineteenth-century European fiction for his preference. A stereo sat silent in a comer. She didn’t use it as Muzak. The tapes and CDs were nineteenth-century European also.
She came back in, carrying a teapot and mugs on a wooden tray. “What do you like in it?”
“Nothing. Thanks.” He took a mug and held it, enjoying its heat.
“Well.” She sank into the easy chair, put the book aside, and looked at him with a civil but careful smile. “What brings you here?”
“Inquisitiveness. I’m curious to know what the mood’s like in your school. Among the teachers, the parents, the kids.”
“Why don’t you just phone my principal? Or the superintendent, and you can find out about every school in town.”
“I’m not interested in official versions. I want to know what things look like to you.”
Doria studied him levelly for a long moment. “I don’t know if I want to tell you anything, Colonel. The minute you learn something, you start throwing tear gas or kicking people in the face. And I don’t like being asked to be an army stool pigeon.”
“Would you be happier with the Wabbies? Or the People’s Action Front?”
“That’s the fallacy of the false dilemma. Look, I know you mean well, but if I cooperated with you I don’t really think we’d have the Bill of Rights back any sooner.”
“We’re not going to have the Bill of Rights back. Ever. And I’m not trying to put you in a false dilemma. The question now is how many people we can get through this mess into something better. Not something good. Just better than what we’ve got now.”
“Fine. But why do you need me to help?”
“Because you’re small and perceptive — ”
“ — and susceptible to flattery?”
“I don’t have time for flattery. You’re smart. You’re in touch with people on a level of intimacy that I can’t reach. They tell you things, you notice things, that never get into the databases. I could get along without your help, but I’d get along better with it. You could get along better, too.”
“Ah. What’s in it for me?”
“Not much. But I can get your school a little more electricity, more supplies, some vitamin supplements.”
“You bastard.” She said it without venom. “You know just where to push, didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t going to offer you a Cadillac and a fur coat.”
She thought for a long time before speaking. Pierce didn’t mind. She was nice to look at. “I have to warn you. Nothing you supply is linked with me, and my school doesn’t get special treatment. If we get vitamins, every school in town gets vitamins.”
“Good.”
“Okay, Colonel, let’s talk.”
“Call me Jerry.”
The talk went on late into the night. They drank more tea; she made cookies. While they cooled, she took him for a walk around the neighbourhood.
“I wish to God I could do this more often,” she murmured as their shoes squeaked in the snow. “It’s really demoralizing to have to barricade yourself in your own house when the sun goes down.”
“You’re pretty brave to be living alone.”
“Nope, just unlucky. Turned out the family upstairs were illegals. They got shipped back to Mexico.”
“I know.”
“Of course. I forgot, sorry.”
“Please — I wasn’t criticizing or being snotty. I hadn’t thought about the Galindezes since I read about them in September. Why didn’t you move somewhere safer?”
“Oh — you get tired of moving after a while. I couldn’t face boxing up all my books again, so I stayed put. Maybe somebody will move in upstairs, or not. I don’t care.”
“I can find you someplace a little safer.”
“Uh-uh.” They walked in silence for a block, past houses whose curtained windows revealed no sign of life. “D’you like being a Trainable?”
“Sure.” Her question had surprised him.
“I guess it’s a lot of responsibility.”
“I don’t mind that. I have the feeling I can make a difference.”
“Can you?”
“Sometimes. Not often enough, but sometimes.”
“That’s how I feel about being a teacher. I look at my class every morning and I think: You poo
r little buggers, maybe I can give a couple of you enough of a break to help you hang on.”
“My feelings exactly.”
“‘My feelings exactly,’” she mocked him. “Do you have room for feelings, when your brain’s so packed full of data?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have feelings, Doria.”
“You keep them all bottled up, then?”
“Until I run into someone who understands them.”
The snow was heavier now, and the street lights had gone out. The sky was a dark grey. Doria held his arm to steady herself, and then let go a little slowly. He took her hand.
“Let’s go have those cookies and another cup of tea,” he said. “I have to be back at the base by midnight.”
He came to her house often after that — not every night, but three or four times a week, always after dark. Before long she took him into her bed and he found surprising consolation there: surprising because he had hoped only for the energy and grace of her body, and instead received an unexpected understanding. She did not mother him, nor did she dissolve into clinging anxiety; she was a partner, responding to his moods with laughter and intensity, anger and delight.
One night in mid-November, he left her house around 11:30. The Plymouth, parked as always around the corner, was beeping quietly when he unlocked it. He picked up the cellular phone and identified himself.
“You got a message scrambled on your Polymath, sir,” said the comm. technician. “It’s eyes only, so I can’t patch you through.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m on my way home.”
Pierce drove quickly back to the base and his apartment. He ordered Polly to boot before the door had even swung shut.
“Scrambled message, Jerry. For your eyes only.”
“Very good. Run it.”
The letters appeared on the screen for no more than a tenth of a second, but that was longer than Pierce needed: URGENT YOU BE AT FERMILAB BATAVIA ILLINOIS BY 0500 HOURS CST 12 NOV.
MATS WILL ARRIVE MHAFB BY 1230 HOURS MST TO PICK YOU UP. WILL MEET YOU AT O’HARE. ERIC.
The Fall of the Republic (The Chronoplane Wars Book 2) Page 4
