Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (10 page)

"It's like Caesar posing as the friend of the people, then overthrowing the Roman Republic," Faith declared. "It's like Napoleon coming on as the defender of the French Revolution, then making himself emperor. It's like Hitler getting power legally, then destroying free government in Germany. It's been tyranny's formula for 2,200 years!"

Exciting talk. The meetings of the AFA were noisy, fueled partly by cheap wine, partly by testosterone, but mainly by her fiery words. Her boys spread the message in every possible way, and yet they knew—for she had taught them—that words alone could never change history. Lanky, bearded Karl, aka Friedberger, liked to quote Goethe's line
am Anfang war die Tat
, in the beginning was the Deed. But it was Thoreau, aka Andy, and not his garrulous friends who finally volunteered to do what they'd all been talking about. That was when Faith became his alone.

Also when his life changed forever. He left the semiplast classrooms of New Yale, the crowded dorms, the smelly labs, the shoddy wards of not-yet-completely-rebuilt New Haven General Hospital, where he'd worked as an aide to gain practical experience. He really hated to go, and in cool moments wondered just why he'd volunteered to kill the President—how much was idealism, how much sex, and how much a yearning for action that had grown up inside him during his excessively quiet, bookish boyhood.

He told himself,
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done,
but maybe didn't quite believe it, for the day he left Yale a blinding migraine came upon him, forcing him to hole up in a darkened room while Faith put compresses soaked in cold tea on his forehead. After twenty-four agonizing hours the pain faded, and he walked blinking into the sunlight of a summer day. He felt nervous as a young boxer before his first bout, but determined to fulfill the promise he'd made to her, to himself, and to the enigmatic force called Destiny that appeared to be urging him on.

In the Maine woods north of Bangor he practiced marksmanship, making the resinous green glades echo with shots from an impact rifle Faith had obtained on the black market. Every day they checked a website that reported the activities of President Sol. They thought they'd have to go abroad to catch him, and were debating how to obtain passports when his visit to Washington was announced.

That made everything simple. They plugged Faith's little electro in overnight to build up the charge, and next morning headed south. The old capital on the Potomac had survived the War under an umbrella of geosynchronous interceptor satellites that diverted incoming missiles onto Pennsylvania cornfields and the Virginia hunt country. Amish farmers and the horsey set—such as were left—didn't think much of the arrangement, but Washington was saved, alone of the cities in the onetime Eastern Megalopolis. Andy's first sight of it was a confused impression of brick and marble, tall quiet elms and broad acres of greensward badly in need of a mowing, for the War had left the American government too impoverished even to cut its own grass on a regular basis.

Faith knew the city well and led Andy via mysterious ways—a closed Metro station, abandoned service tunnels, a collapsed wall opening into a nineteenth-century cellar—until they reached a dusty cast-iron staircase corkscrewing up inside the two-centuries-old Executive Office Building. At the top lay a small loft whose single dirty window gave a slanted view of the White House lawn and the platform—still noisily under construction—where Mahmud Alonzo Sol was to address his American subjects the following day.

Andy was astounded at Faith's professionalism, her uncanny ability to find the aerie, then to slip him and the illegal rifle into it through a gauntlet of electronic sensors and armed guards. How, he asked, did she manage her miracles? "Better," she smiled, "that you don't know," and he accepted that, for he was about to put his life on the line, and had no time to think of anything else.

 
TODAY AN OLDER, wiser, weightier, and infinitely more cynical Andy exited a black limo at the Pentagon, and with Gomez followed Connie past sensors that blinked at their IDs and banks of lasers that withheld their fire.

The trio entered a concourse with milling uniformed crowds and shops selling goods not available to the general public.
To Serve All Humanity
was everywhere, in every language of the earth, as inescapable as Koranic verses in a mosque—chiseled into stone, cast into steel security screens, woven into carpets, stitched into uniform patches like their own. Connie ignored a rank of golf carts offering rides in plaintive small robotic voices—"E Ring, sir or madam, I will take you to any place on E Ring"—and led the way down kilometers of musty corridors, past cubbyhole offices where uniformed clerks bent over flickering monitors, and up ramps eroded by a century and a half of shuffling feet.

Soon he was hopelessly lost. Despite its logical form of five concentric rings and transecting diagonals, the Pentagon was hell to navigate. Here a wall had been erected for no visible reason, while over there a battery of lasers stood ready to fry anyone whose ID didn't give him right of passage. Everywhere, posted against the walls like caryatids, stood guards in the red berets of the
Spetsnaz
—Security's own security force—thick young men and hard-eyed women wearing X badges and carrying weighty impact pistols.

Connie threaded the maze without hesitation. Locked doors were no problem, for her palm pressed against glowing sensor pads opened them all. Twice she made Andy try the same trick, for she'd entered his print into the system, and was pleased that the computer remembered it. Everyone was so indifferent to their passage that he began to feel like a ghost moving unobserved among the living. Or maybe the other way around. On Tuamotu he'd become used to ghosts, which the villagers saw everywhere and accepted as a part of life, and he began to wonder if the crowds were the ghosts of the men and women for whom the Pentagon had originally been built—fighters in a war against genuine evil that now seemed as remote and fabulous as the Crusades. Then Connie murmured, "Here we are," and all his fancies vanished.

They halted in a corridor outside a conference room. Twenty or so guards were lounging around—not
Spetsnaz,
just ordinary enlisted people with IX tags—peons assigned as personal aides to serve, protect, and grovel to a general officer, the same role that Andy and Gomez were enacting. All wore empty holsters and Andy learned why, when a sergeant wearing a red beret gave him and Gomez each a chit and removed their guns for safekeeping. "God, they're so
paranoid,
" Connie muttered, reminding him of the old saw that paranoid people sometimes have real enemies.

The double doors to the conference room stood open and the interior was banal, with a speaker's dais and lectern and metal chairs that were clamped to the floor so they couldn't be used as weapons. Only X's could enter, and even they had to pass through still more sensors able to detect the different kinds of plastic used in bombs, nonmetal weapons, and exploding bullets. Connie tucked an earbud under her short, dark regulation hair to catch the simultaneous translation, and walked past the gadgets without a glance to join the staff members already seated inside.

Gomez and Andy lingered, surrounded by a hum of gossip. The enlisted people all used the f-word as noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection, sometimes with comic results. "I told that effin effer, eff you, Jack, that's what I effin told him," said a guy, and his pal replied, "Effin A."

Then a tall, pale, blunt-featured man wearing multiple stars entered the conference room from a door outside Andy's range of vision, mounted the dais, and took his place at the lectern. Instantly the hallway quieted down, for the Chief of Security had appeared. The general officers inside applauded politely, and at the same time the doors—steel, Andy noted, and thick at that—closed slowly, like vault doors controlled by a timer. But before they clicked shut, he spotted an iridescent shimmer in the tall man's uniform, as if his gray tunic were woven not of cloth but of oily metal wires.

"We have our work cut out for us," he told Gomez in the nearly imperceptible whisper he'd mastered while in prison. He realized now that this plot might turn into a fiasco as total as the last one.

For a year or more after it happened, Andy had been able to remember his attack on Mahmud Alonzo Sol only in bad dreams.

Then, little by little, during his life with Esperanza on Tuamotu, he'd become able to remember it, though not with pleasure. Sometimes he lay half the night in her arms, shaking with sobs, while the baby Corazon slept peacefully in the crib he'd made her. Now he lived it again, the flashback signaled by an olfactory hallucination, the dry reek of the old mouse droppings that had littered the floor of the loft.

He could almost hear Faith pleading to stay with him and share his fate, and his own voice telling her no. She'd confessed to being pregnant with his child, so how could he allow her to run such a terrible risk? She dropped her clothes on the filthy floor and approached him, holding her little breasts in her hands like pomegranates on a plate. He pressed her back against the wall, all thought swept away by the rising of his own hot seed, and they coupled a last time, his hands holding her under the butt, her legs wrapped around his waist. She uttered a little mewling cry, and when he released her, wept like an abandoned child.

She dressed and left him, and the endless night began. While sunset faded slowly from the window, he sat with his back against the door, the impact rifle lying across his lap, the greasy magazine inserted and the first round already chambered. He kept checking his watch, but it appeared to have stopped, and after a while he gave up in sheer frustration. Instead, he closed his eyes and began writing the history of the assassination, like a scholar of the future looking back.

Boldly Thoreau struck the blow, and the President fell dead. Beginning at the White House and spreading outward like ripples on a pond, chaos enveloped the city. The brave assassin discarded his weapon and silently retraced his path down the spiral stair to the cellar. He climbed over the collapsed wall and entered the Metro tunnel, feeling his way in the darkness down the long-disused tracks, guiding himself by the cool and rusty third rail. He reached a station that had become a dormitory for the homeless, edged silently through the crowd of shadowy, ill-smelling forms, climbed a frozen escalator, and reentered the chaotic world above.

Dodging through alternations of flaring searchlights and pitchy shadows, he worked his way down alleys, hastened across streets and squares, and at last escaped from the city. For a week he hiked the open countryside, moving at night, pausing only to steal food from a kitchen or take a day's rest in an abandoned barn. He crossed parts of four states, all the way back to New Haven where his friends greeted him with cheers, tears, and embraces. Hidden in a safe house, he assisted Faith at the birth of their son (daughter?), and with her watched the child grow up, an inheritor of the new birth of freedom that her vision and his courage had brought to the whole world!

Maybe he fell asleep and dreamed part of this fantasy. Anyway, he awakened suddenly, propped in an awkward position with his neck wry and all his muscles stiff. When he stood up and tried doing deep knee bends, the cramps that shot through his legs almost made him cry out. That terrified him, for muffled sounds began to echo in the old building and he wondered if guards might be giving it a final search. But the sounds died away, silence returned, and he relaxed and touched his watch. After all, it
was
running, just very, very slowly. The green display said 0001—one minute past midnight—and he still had half the darkness to endure.

Dozing, stretching, shivering—however the building was heated, none of the warmth reached the loft—he endured hours that had lost all semblance of time, had become downpayments on a bad eternity. Shortly before dawn he had to take a crap, really
had
to, and the loft became more fragrant than ever. By the time faint daylight returned to the window and random noises outside the building told of a crowd gathering, Andy wanted to kill Mahmud Alonzo Sol, not so much for enslaving humanity as for making a boy gently raised in pristine Vermont spend the worst and longest night of his life in a closet that stank of rodent shit and his own.

Finally a wave of cheers announced the President's arrival. Carefully avoiding the deposit he'd made on the floor, Andy stretched out on his belly with his face to the window and used one sleeve to clean a spyhole in the dirty glass. Far below, a few faded-looking American dignitaries were taking their places on the first row of seats facing the speaker's platform. As a recording played the Grand March from Aida, the nation's honored guest appeared, a large smiling man with olive skin and glistening black hair, who moved confidently from the rear of the speaker's platform to the front.

Andy flexed his stiff fingers and used the rifle barrel to knock out a window pane. The breaking of the glass sounded very loud, but he never heard the tinkle that followed, because the shards had such a long way to fall. He wrapped the rifle's sling around his left wrist, put his right eye to the scope, tapped the aiming stud to enlarge the image, and centered the red dot of the laser on the third button of the President's dark double-breasted suit. He touched the firing stud, and the stock thumped the hollow of his shoulder in a muffled drumroll until the clip was empty.

And then—exactly
then
—the whole thing turned to farce. Andy's aim was good, a big black electronic module behind the President disintegrated into bits and pieces.
But that was all.
The speech went on, as if the President didn't choose to dignify with his notice anything as trivial as sixteen exploding bullets. Andy was still gaping when thunder resounded outside the loft, only it wasn't thunder but steel-toed combat boots echoing on the wooden floors. The door burst in and men with big hands dragged him out like dogs pulling a badger from its hole.