Alternities (51 page)

Shan rested her head on his shoulder. “I’ve always liked the Appalachians better than the Rockies. The Rockies are beautiful the way ice is beautiful—stark and sculpted and cold. These mountains are full of life.”

“I’ve never seen the Rocky Mountains,” he said forlornly.

She reached up and kissed his cheek. “We’ll put it on the list of things to do together.”

“Yeah,” he said without conviction.

“Did I say something wrong?”

Pulling her closer, Wallace said, “I just can’t think about that kind of thing. All I can handle is where I am right now. I can’t think about the future.”

“What about the past?”

“I can’t think about that, either.”

They held each other, the contact between their bodies a fragile bridge between minds a thousand miles apart in thought. A meteor streaked across the sky overhead, unnoticed.

At last, Shan broke the silence. “I wish you’d talk about her,” she said gently.

He shook his head wordlessly.

“You’re trying to pretend you didn’t have a life there,” she said. “I know that’s not true. You don’t have to protect me. You’re married. You have a daughter—”

“She was such a charmer on that train,” he said, giving voice to the memories which had occupied him. “A year and a half old and so full of smiles and hugs. She’d hold whole conversations with you, her half all nonsense except for a real word even now and then to make you wonder. We could have adopted her out a half-dozen times, the way she made friends all through the car. She’d sit on Ruthann’s lap and look out the window at the scenery racing past and say—”

A strangled sound of anguish scalded Wallace’s throat like molten metal. He shook himself as though shaking free from an invisible hand and tried to finish the thought. “And she’d say ‘Bye, tree’—‘Bye, house’—”

The breach tore wide open. Wallace dropped his head to his drawn-up knees and began to cry, great noisy sobs that racked his body as he fought them and failed. Shan’s arms were tight around him, but he barely knew she was there.

“God, I miss her,” he moaned, his words muffled against his crossed arms. “I miss my little girl.”

Wearing her worry on her face, Ellen O’Neill entered the study where her husband was reading. “Gregory?”

He looked up and saw immediately the tightness around her mouth, the clouded eyes. “What’s wrong?” he said as he rose from the chair.

“I don’t know,” she said. “There are three men at the door. Two are soldiers. The other showed me Secret Service ID and said I should tell you ‘maison de sante.’ That means asylum, doesn’t it?”

O’Neill’s mouth was suddenly dry. “Yes. It’s the code phrase for an Alpha List evacuation.”

“Oh, God.”

He reached for her hand. “Don’t panic yet. Asylum is a low-urgency plan—precautionary, phased, core group first,” he said, knowing it was false assurance. With its assortment of illness/‌vacation/‌speaking-tour cover stories for top officials. Asylum was exactly the kind of evacuation which would precede a preemptive strike.

Not surprisingly, she, too, knew his words were counterfeit. “What’s going on, Gregory? Is it what you were afraid of?”

“I think so.”

“Can’t you do anything?”

He reached for the phone. “I’m going to try. Please cover for me. I’ll be down as soon as I can.”

The number he began dialing was one he had never used before, but he knew it as well as his own. It belonged to John Rasten, senior Washington correspondent for the
New York Times
, a man whose name rarely came up in White House conversations without epithets attached. O’Neill had committed it to memory the day after his disappointing meeting with Albert Tackett.

In the two weeks since, O’Neill had wrestled daily with the question of whether to use it. Twice he had gotten as far as dialing the area prefix before changing his mind.

It was not time, he had told himself. Reading rumors and clues like tea leaves in a fortune-teller’s cup, he had found reason for hope. The Q-plane was still missing, but Kondratyev’s blistering letter of protest had virtually silenced the gloating and cheerleading over the D-57 incident.

In the sternest possible language, Kondratyev had warned Robinson to “keep your place or be put in it.” The text contemptuously referred to the Weasel squadrons as “trivial irrelevancies” and made no demand for their removal.

The explanation for that surprise was embodied in an astonishing attachment—seventy-five pages apparently drawn directly from working Soviet military plans. A list of nearly three thousand American military sites, industrial centers, and other targets, along with the number and size of missiles and bombs allocated to them.
See what you risk
, the list said.

O’Neill could imagine the vehemence with which Soviet strategists had resisted releasing the target list. But there was little in the list that American analysts had not guessed at, and it was a masterful psychological stroke, a daring exercise in diplomacy and statecraft. It had had a chilling effect in the E ring, along the Bradley Corridor.

But not, it now seemed, where it most needed to—in the Oval Office.

The phone clicked and hummed. “Rasten residence,” said a woman’s voice, thin and tired.

“John Rasten, please.”

“Who’s calling?”

“This is Secretary—”

That was as far as O’Neill got before the connection was abruptly broken. He dialed again immediately, only to hear the grating sound of a busy signal.

His wife’s voice outside the door alerted him to replace the receiver. A moment later a black-suited man preceded Ellen into the room. “Secretary O’Neill, I’m agent Ken Andrews, Secret Service.”

O’Neill fixed the stranger with a frosty gaze. “I asked you to wait downstairs.”

“Yes, sir. I was concerned that there might be some problem. Under the circumstances, I thought caution more important than etiquette.”

“What exactly are the circumstances, Mr. Andrews? Do you have a sitsum for me?”

“I understand that briefing material will be available at the assembly point.”

O’Neill gazed steadily into the younger man’s eyes, looking for confirmation. “Yes. Well, as you see, there is no problem. If you’ll excuse me, I need to pack.”

“With all respect, sir, there’s no need. Your go bag will be sufficient for the interim,” Andrews said, referring to the prepacked suitcase in the bottom of the big closet.

It was no mystery that Andrews knew he had one; any top official who might be called to travel on short notice did. In any event, Alpha List had been warned to plan ahead. “It won’t be sufficient for Mrs. O’Neill.”

“Having you both leave abruptly could arouse curiosity, Mr. Secretary. My instructions are for Corporal King to stay with Mrs. O’Neill. Another agent will come in the morning for her. She’ll have plenty of time, sir.”

It was then that O’Neill knew that Andrews was no Secret Service agent, knew that even if he managed to be alone that Rasten’s line would always be busy to his call. With a growing sense of futility and desperation, he measured himself against the younger, stronger, and highly wary visitor.

Andrews caught the appraising look and knew its meaning. “We need to be very careful, Mr. Secretary. If Mrs. O’Neill could get your bag, please—”

His wife was sensitive to the shifting undercurrent, the unspoken tension, but without understanding. “Gregory—”

“Go ahead, Ellen. Please get my go bag.”

“What’s going on, Gregory?”

“Things may be—more serious than I thought,” he said, his gaze never leaving Andrews. “Please.”

She brought him the bag and an anxiety-laced kiss. “Are you all right?” she whispered.

“Try not to worry,” he said, taking the bag from her hand. He kissed her forehead tenderly. “I love you.”

Andrews watched the exchange with voyeuristic zeal. “If you could, Mr. Secretary—” he said, stepping back from the door.

O’Neill nodded mutely and led the way downstairs and out into the yard. His wife was halted by the soldiers at the front door, and he waved a final good-bye before climbing into the back seat of the dark blue sedan.

“Where are you taking me?” he asked as the vehicle bumped its way down the tree-lined drive.

“The Minnesota retreat.”

“Will the President be there?”

“No. You’re in quarantine, Mr. Secretary. President’s orders.”

“What’s going to happen to my wife?”

“House arrest. A guarantee against your good behavior. There will be no more calls, Mr. Secretary.”

O’Neill slumped back against the seat cushions and looked out the window. “No,” he said. “No more calls.”

In the week since Eden had come to the safe house, Rayne Wallace had lost the thread of what was happening around him. The daily sessions continued, but at a less frenetic level—four or five hours a day instead of eight or nine—and without the participation of either Eden or, most days, Bayshore.

Eden was in near-isolation working on the alternity puzzle, emerging only to consult with another specialist by phone or to ask for more of the paper, clay, and wooden sticks he was evidently using to build models. As far as Wallace knew, Eden was still refusing to voice any further conclusions or speculations.

Bayshore’s focus had returned to Indianapolis and the Guard’s network there. Apparently NIA and FBI agents under his direction were blanketing the station staff, though still on a hands-off basis. The mole-bait had not been taken, and Arens had been moved from city jail to another safe house, from which he had already attempted two escapes.

Even Shan excused herself from the sessions more often than not, for which Wallace did not blame her. The ego value of having an eager audience for his every utterance had faded, and he was often bored himself. And the lighter schedule meant he had more unpressured hours with her, hours which passed in an easy haze of stargazing and lovemaking and watching spring erupt in full flower in the meadow.

If not for Davis, patient and persistent, the interview schedule would probably have been dropped completely. The ethnologist was determined to document every conceivable aspect of Wallace’s life and experience. Wallace did not understand where the drive came from, what made his visit to the smoker house in Red or the time the grain elevator in Connorsville blew up like a bomb matters of interest.

Already Davis knew enough about him to write a biography so detailed that not even his mother would be able to endure reading it. Wallace had even found himself talking about Ruthann with Davis and a sympatheric “interpersonal auditor.” He remembered some of his answers with discomfort.

“Did you love her or not?” they had asked.

“I loved her.”

“What changed? What was missing? Did you tell her what you wanted?”

“I didn’t know what to ask for,” he confessed forlornly. “I didn’t pay enough attention when I had it.”

The driveway and the makeshift helipad were as busy as ever, the morning confusion in the kitchen and bathrooms as great, the traffic through the basement communications center as relentless. But Wallace could no longer see where all the activity pointed. Nor was it clear whose work was controlling the pace—Eden’s, Bayshore’s, or even Davis’.

He did not want to think about the future, but it was becoming harder everyday to live in the present. Without direction, he could neither mourn nor plan. He was at once happier and more miserable than he could remember being, at once flying and crawling through the slime, his joy married to his pain in a way that made it impossible to let go of either.

Rudderless, he drifted through the hours, taking his direction from those around him. It was easy, but it was also empty. He knew that somehow he had to seize a goal, choose a direction. But the shattering truth was that at that moment, he could not even say what sort of choices he hoped to be offered.

If he was to have any choices at all.

The first wave of Alpha List evacuees began arriving at the Tower at six in the morning.

These were the elite, Robinson’s top appointees and friends—the Attorney General, the President’s counsel. Senator Endicott, and others of equal stature. It was as important to conceal their presence in Boston as it was their absence from their home cities. After Endicott’s encounter with a Soviet asset, no one doubted that the Tower was under close scrutiny.

So the evacuees arrived invisibly, anonymously, riding the company vans and even the flesh-haulers, concealed among the mass of regular Tower staffers. Children and a few of the most recognizable adults came in under darkness, huddled on the back floors of private cars driven by Guard managers and executives—Tackett chauffered the Secretary of State to the Tower in just that fashion. The children loved it, the adults hated it.

As they trickled in, most were escorted to the ninth floor. The analysts’ cubicles there had been stripped of furniture, numbered, and supplied with pillows and air mattresses to create a makeshift dormitory.

Once there, the waiting began. Several mattresses were soon being used for naps, and the stacks of magazines and the stocks of food available from the accommodations team were in heavy demand. The children played in the aisles, while the adults stood in groups of three and four, wondering in worried tones just what crisis had brought them there.

In his thirty-sixth floor suite, Albert Tackett was entertaining the same question. Notice of the Asylum alert had come on the quiet, via a messenger from the Pentagon’s civil defense office, which was responsible for the logistics. There were no explanations included with the notice, only a final hoolist and a timetable.

Other than an unannounced drill, Tackett could only think of one fact or rumor to account for the move: the threat of an imminent reprisal for the sinking of D-57. If that were the case, military facilities everywhere would be on alert, under lockdown rules, but the aide Tackett sent on a manufactured errand to the Navy yard had no trouble getting in.

That report so troubled Tackett that he had risked a call to a family friend who lived near Hanscomb Air Force Base, just outside Lexington. No, she told him, looking out the window. The planes are just where they always are. Everything’s quiet.