“Jonathan — I’m sorry, but my workload’s really heavy. I’ve been doing most of what Eric Wigner used to handle, plus my own stuff, plus trying to fill holes in the damn database.”
“Drop it like a hot potato for a week, all of it. I’m going to need running reports on all federal politicians and maybe some of the senior bureaucrats. Any whiff of scandal should come straight to me.”
She rolled her eyes. “I suppose I should thank you for expecting so much from me.”
“Take any three junior people you need. Tell their bosses I approved your request. But I don’t want us caught with our pants down again.”
“Well, it’ll be a change from monitoring arsenic levels in alfalfa.”
While she was waiting for her new staff to wrap up their current tasks, Jaz accessed the police files on the Charles arrest. They included a report on an anonymous phone call tipping FBI agent Oliver Rivera to the likelihood of a fentanyl transaction at Old La Guardia, the arrest of a man observed to be placing a briefcase in locker number 4227, and the subsequent arrest of Congressman Charles when he opened the locker, removed the briefcase, and replaced it with his own. The first one had contained three hundred thousand dollars in cash and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of meat and dairy ration stamps. The congressman’s had contained nothing but a shaving kit in which was a small plastic box full of fentanyl.
According to the police report, Tony Charles had been interrogated by the feds. Jaz turned to the FBI database; the dumb-dumbs in the Bureau thought their computer security was the best in the world, and the Agency had long encouraged them in that belief, so she had no problem accessing the Charles file. The interrogation had not yet been logged in; she made a note to check back, and then met with her new team to outline what Clement wanted. The three teenagers bitched and moaned and went back to their cubicles.
Jaz spent some time going through the congressman’s files, finding nothing of interest, and then went back to the FBI. The interrogation was now logged in. Tony Charles had said very little except to demand his lawyer (a touching reminder of habits ingrained before the Emergency had made them pointless), and to say: “That little bastard Winger did this.”
“Who is Winger?” Rivera had asked.
“Some little creep in the CIA, but he’s really working for the goddam Iffers.”
Then the congressman had refused to answer any more questions, and had been placed in a cell to think things over.
Jaz grinned. Winger indeed. It had to be Eric. But what on earth was he up to?
She decided she would have to find out, but whether she would tell Clement was another question.
Morton Friedberg and Winston Walker, both GS-lOs in the Agency’s Internal Security Division in Langley, gaped at the screen of Friedberg’s Polymath. Using a printout that had been anonymously delivered to him, Friedberg had spent the last day tracing bank accounts from the Cayman Islands to Nagasaki. Walker, the division’s expert on Japanese intelligence, had been providing advice and analysis.
“I can’t believe it,” Friedberg said. “I just can’t believe it.”
“Thornton and Hardaker,” Walker muttered. “Two of the toughest bastards on ExComm, feeding the goddamn Japs.”
“If this is right, they’ve been doing it for over two years. The Japs’ve known every policy decision, how everybody on ExComm voted, what we were doing in Venezuela and Canada — the works.”
“I’ll say this much for them,” said Walker. “Moriyama’s paid them a lot more than he usually does.”
On the screen, Friedberg’s Polly waved at him. “Morty,” it said, “the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is carrying a story about this case on its current newscast. Shall I patch you in?”
“Jesus H. Christ. Yes, please.”
" — Hardaker, the former president of Transmarine Corporation, is alleged to have been on the payroll of the Japanese Secret Service for almost three years. He was appointed to the Executive Committee of the Civil Emergency Administration as soon the Emergency was declared. Sources say the Japanese have paid the two men almost twenty million dollars each.
“Neither man could be reached for comment on these charges, and American intelligence sources say they have no comment on the report.”
Friedberg swore and slapped the table top. “The goddamn idiot Canadians should’ve jumped on this story. Hell, now it’ll be all over the northern U.S.”
“Worse,” said Walker glumly. “That’s a broadcast that gets picked up by National Public Radio. It’s all over the country.”
Friedberg glared at him. “National…Public…Radio? They carry foreign newscasts?”
“They have for years, Morty. But not for much longer,” said Walker.
“ExComm spokesperson Theresa Lewis told reporters tonight that Hardaker and Thornton had been under suspicion for some time, and that they had been given only disinformation to pass on to the Japanese. The two men are now under arrest at an undisclosed site near Washington.”
Pierce popped another Tuborg and flipped channels. The story was on every news broadcast.
“They’re certainly trying to make it look good,” he remarked.
“Good luck to them,” Wigner said with a smile.
The next morning, Pierce left Kennedy International on a commercial flight to Albuquerque, ostensibly on an emergency trip to his ill mother in Taos. In Albuquerque he changed IDs. As Jason O’Hara, a GS-8 in the Defence Department, he connected with a MATS flight from Kirtland Air Force Base to Salt Lake City; there he rented a car and joined a convoy headed north into Idaho. He drove long into the night to Mountain Home.
A direct flight to Mountain Home would have been easier, but he wanted no one at the base to know he was around; besides, it gave him a chance to see what the countryside looked like these days.
For mile after mile, through the rich farm country of northern Utah, he saw deserted farms and orchards, fields gone to quack grass and scrub: The few occupied farmhouses were the ones with barbed wire and signs warning that trespassers would be shot on sight; some had the Wabbie logo as well. The collapse of agriculture was nearly complete: generations of technological change and economic idiocy had driven American farmers back to Third World levels. Well, they would do better in the clean soils of the downtime worlds, where the pests were not evolved to thrive on poisons and the water wasn’t carcinogenic.
It was after midnight when he parked in a security garage on the edge of downtown Mountain Home. The streets were silent and empty; not even army patrols were out. He walked a dozen blocks to Doria’s house without being challenged, feeling annoyed at the slackness of his successor.
A light was on in the living room; he knocked softly and called her name. A moment later Doria stared at him through the peephole in the front door. “My God, Jerry, what are you doing here?”
“I was in the neighbourhood and thought I’d drop in.”
The locks and latches clicked and rattled and she swung the door open. Then she stepped back to let him in. He walked in, grinning a little shyly, and undid the toggles on his duffel coat.
“Let me take that. Come and sit down and I’ll make a cup of tea. Do you want something to eat?”
“Just tea, please. And a bed.”
Doria stood in the doorway to the kitchen, arms folded. She was wearing a bathrobe he didn’t remember. “Jerry — I don’t think I can put you up. I’m married now.”
“Really?” Pierce felt a faint flutter of alarm. That hadn’t been in the files when he’d checked them before leaving New York. “Congratulations. When did this happen?”
“August.”
“Good for you. It’s okay. I can sleep on the couch.”
“Jerry — ” She growled in frustration and went into the kitchen. He heard a clatter of kettle and cups. Heavy footsteps sounded in the hallway and a tall man, in a bathrobe just like Doria’s, came into the living room. Jerry stood up and extended his hand.
“Hi. I’m Jerry Pierce.”
“Oh. Doria talks about you all the time. Hi, I’m LaMar King.”
“Good to meet you. Gee, I wish I’d known. I could’ve brought you a proper wedding present. All I’ve got is some canned Polish ham.”
“All right,” LaMar said. “We haven’t seen ham around here in weeks.”
Doria came back in with a tea tray and put it on the end table. She seemed more composed.
“Okay, what’s this all about?” she asked as she handed Pierce a cup.
“I need you to deliver something to a guy named Wes McCullough. He’s got a little ranch off Highway 20.”
“Why can’t you deliver it yourself?” LaMar asked.
“I’m shy.”
“He never did like answering questions unless he felt like it,” Doria told her husband.
They chatted over tea, gossiping about events in Mountain Home — a fire at the mall, the killing of a meatlegger, problems with increasing violence among Doria’s pupils. LaMar, also a teacher, was worried about his students’ involvement in the Wabbies.
“They’ve really bounced back since you were here,” he said. “You see that damn bunny logo of theirs everywhere. The kids think Wabbies are some kind of modern Robin Hoods. Even some of the other teachers are leaning that way.”
“Not Joe Martin,” Doria said.
“Right, and he got beat up. Hell, they even have people like Senator Cardwell backing them these days. No wonder the kids think it’s cool to be a thug with a shotgun.”
“They’ll get over it,” Pierce said. “God, I’m bushed. Is it okay if I just crash here on the couch? I’ll be gone in the morning.”
“I’ll get some sheets and blankets,” Doria said.
In the morning, Doria woke at a little after six when the front door quietly closed. She slipped out of bed without waking her husband and went into the living room. The sheets and blankets were folded neatly on the couch; on the end table was a small padded envelope and a folded sheet of paper. The paper gave instructions for delivering the envelope. It sounded awfully complicated to her, but she knew she could do it. She was annoyed at the businesslike tone of the note, as if they hadn’t made love on that couch and a lot of other places in the house. It confirmed something she had sensed in him last night, a change: a coldness in his eyes, a division somewhere deep in his mind. She wondered what he’d been doing back in New York that could have changed him so much. But she would do what he asked.
Doria sat drinking tea in the kitchen, watching the sky turn rosy in the east. The 6:30 news on the radio was full of stories about the ExComm spies and some New York congressman, arrested for drug peddling, who had hanged himself in his cell. The president was calling for renewed moral firmness in government.
She wondered what a ragged-ass Idaho rancher could do with a specially delivered computer disc.
CHAPTER XIII
Two days after Pierce returned from Idaho, he was working in his office at Semiotronics when Wigner walked in looking grim and tense.
“They’ve found another chronoplane uptime.”
'‘Uptime?"
“Somewhere in the thirty-fourth century. The Columbia team opened it up five days ago, and it took me this long to find out.”
“Well? What’s it like?”
“Dead. That’s all I know so far. Oh, and they’ve named it Urizen.”
That night Pierce took the evening subway to an old apartment building on Claremont Avenue, a block from the Columbia campus. The neighbourhood hired its own rifle patrols; one of them stopped Pierce as he was walking past the old Juilliard School of Music, but the Jason O’Hara DoD identification got him through. The lobby guard was a little slower, but finally buzzed the apartment of the man Pierce wanted to talk to.
“It’s a guy named O’Hara from the Defence Department,” the guard shouted into the intercom.
“I don’t know him,” the answer came, “and I’m very busy.”
“Dr. Levy — it’s about Urizen,” Pierce called.
The intercom was silent for a second. “Shit. Send him up.”
The fourth floor apartment had been carved out of a larger one: a long hallway ran from the front door to the living room. Philip Levy, in jeans and a Harvard sweatshirt, escorted Pierce down the hall and waved him into an armchair. Pierce glimpsed a harried-looking woman at work in the kitchen.
Levy sat on a couch facing him. He was a slender, hard-faced man with intelligent and suspicious eyes.
“If you know about Urizen, you ought to know better than to blab it in public. What’s the story?”
“1 need you to be able to keep your mouth shut, too. Deal?”
“This smells like some kind of blackmail.”
“No. You’re under tight security. So am I. But we may be able to help each other.”
“Maybe.”
“I’m the guy they sent through to Ulro.”
Levy looked startled. “I heard the guy went nuts.”
“I did. Nothing lasts forever.”
“So. Well, I’m glad to know you. Glad to know you’re okay. Why d’you want to know about Urizen?”
“I was sent to find an information repository down in Riverside Park. It was in ruins. My boss wonders if maybe the repository on Urizen is in better shape.”
“So he can send you through and make you crazy again?”
Pierce smiled. “Something like that.”
“He’d be wasting your time. We’ve done two sorties in robot tanks, and most of Manhattan, as far as we can tell, is buried in lava.”
“Lava?”
“Looks like there must be a string of new volcanoes just off the coast, or on Long Island. We had to move the I-Screen up to the fourth floor of Pupin Hall to get above the lava. But I’ll tell you this — Urizen’s got more atmosphere than Ulro. Almost as much as Mars.”
“And volcanoes would be due to — ”
“The burn zone around the equator. It must’ve completely changed plate structure and dynamics all over the planet. We figure Ulro and Urizen won’t settle down for a couple of million years. They’re in tectonic convulsions.”
“So Urizen had a Doomsday, too.”
“Looks that way. Eventually we’ll find relics and get the details, but it all looks like Ulro plus a thousand years. Too bad.”
“Yes.”
“Can you imagine if we’d opened up a live chronoplane, with people, a thousand years ahead of us? God, we could learn so much.”
“The way the downtime civilizations are going to learn from us.”
Levy’s mouth twitched. “I’ll ignore the sarcasm. In any case, we still seem to be at the head of the line and headed straight for our own Doomsday in less than a century.”
“What’s your team going to do next?”
“Send out more tanks. Study the place. And keep looking for another chronoplane uptime.”
“Think you’ll find more?”
Levy opened his mouth, shut it, and shrugged. “I don’t know, Mr. O’Hara. We’ve got unbelievable data and no theory to explain it. Ishizawa and his people speculated that maybe time was folded on itself during the Big Bang, that every particle in the universe oscillated in time and somehow left ghosts of itself at different points in the timeline. Some people are digging up Everett’s old many-worlds theory.”
“If a particle can jump two ways, it actually jumps both ways and the universe splits into two parallel worlds.”
“Something like that. Maybe it explains Heisenberg indeterminacy, but it doesn’t explain chronoplanes. If we opened up a screen on a world just like our own, only with minor differences, that would help strengthen the Everett theory. Instead, we get these worlds scattered at random over almost a hundred thousand years.”
“Just as well.”
“Huh?”
“Who’d want another world almost exactly like this one?”
Like most people with an emotionally important secret, Levy was glad to talk once the secret was out. He showed Pierce some photog
raphs the tank had taken. The landscape of Morningside Heights was black curves and edges, with occasional drifts of grey ash. The Jersey Palisades were only a long, low bluff above a flat plain where the Hudson River had been. The sun shone down out of a purple sky with just a few stars shining in it.
Pierce looked at the photographs and thought of the dead people in the tunnel, buried now forever. Then he drank a cup of tea offered by Mrs. Levy, thanked them for their time, and left.
Getting the car and enough gas had been a drag, but now that they had them the freedom of movement was exhilarating. Doria and LaMar drove the little Hyundai north on Highway 20 through a glorious autumn morning. At the National Guard roadblocks they explained they were buying eggs for their teachers’ association.
The ranch was a decaying A-frame set beside a couple of orthodox log barns in the middle of a meadow. Two rusted pickups, one evidently being cannibalized to keep the other one running, stood in the dusty barnyard. Chickens darted across the yard. A man stood in the near barn, wearing a brown leather jacket, jeans, and a bolstered Mallory.
“Where’d he get a gun like that?” LaMar wondered quietly as the man walked out to meet them.
“Mallorys are a big deal these days. Very macho. Hi, Mr. McCullough?”
“Yes.”
“Our name is King — I’m Doria, this’s LaMar. We’re from Mountain Home, from the teachers’ association; thought you might be able to sell us ten or twelve dozen eggs.”
“I might. Afraid the price is two dollars an egg plus fifty dollars’ worth of meat stamps.”
LaMar sighed, but Doria answered at once: “Well, it’s a lot, but people are yelling for’em in town. I guess we can afford it.”
“Come on in the barn and get some cartons.”
They moved into the cool, musky air of the bam. McCullough handed them each a half dozen old plastic egg cartons and nodded toward the nests. “Oughta be able to collect’em with no trouble.”
“Thank you.” She kept smiling. As LaMar headed for the nests, Doria paused by McCullough’s side and slipped the disc into the pocket of his leather jacket.
The Fall of the Republic (The Chronoplane Wars Book 2) Page 16
