The Trade of Queens (10 page)

Not all the detonators had degraded. When the high explosive sphere finally blew seventy seconds later, it killed four marine guards as they advanced from truck to truck, closing in on the hostiles' last known location. But the blast was unsequenced and asymmetric. Rather than imploding the weapon's pit and triggering a fission chain reaction, it merely fragmented it and blasted chunks of hot plutonium shrapnel into the surrounding cars and concrete structure of the car park.

*   *   *

July 16, 2003, eleven o'clock and thirty minutes, local time; fighters roared, circling overhead. Beneath the leaden, smoldering skies the clocks had stopped, the telephone exchanges dead and muffled by the electromagnetic pulses. And though the survivors were stirring, shocky and dazed but helping one another shuffle away from the burning holes of the city in every direction—north, south, east, and west—nothing now would ever come to any good.

Stop all the clocks.

Damage Control

It had taken Steve nearly an hour to get Fleming out of his office, during which time he'd gotten increasingly irritated with the skinny, intense agent's insistence that some insane conspiracy of interdimensional nuclear narcoterrorists was about to blow up the Capitol.
Why do the fruitcakes always pick on
me
?
he kept wondering.

Of course the explosion in Braintree checked out—gas mains, according to the wire feed. But that was no surprise: It was the sort of detail a paranoid would glom onto and integrate into their confabulation, especially if it happened close to their front door. One of the first warning signs of any delusional system was the conviction that the victim was at the center of events. Tom Brokaw wasn't reading the news, he was sending you a personal message, encrypted in the twitches of his left eyebrow.

Sure Fleming didn't seem particularly unhinged—other than insofar as his story was completely bugfuck insane and required the listener to suspend their belief in the laws of physics and replace it with the belief that the government was waging a secret war against
drug dealers from another dimension
—but that meant nothing. Steve had been a beat journalist for years before he found his niche on the tech desk. Journalists attract lunatics like dog turds attract flies, and he'd listened to enough vision statements by dot-com CEOs to recognize the signs of a sharp mind that had begun to veer down a reality tunnel lined with flashing lights and industrial espionage. So he'd finally cut Fleming off, halfway down a long, convoluted monologue that seemed to be an attempt to explain how Beckstein had got his attention—not without qualms, because Fleming sounded halfway to stalkerdom when he got onto the subject of rescuing her from some kind of arranged marriage—and raised his hand. “Look,” he said wearily, “this is a bit much. You said they made you translate tapes. And there are these lockets they use for, what did you call it, world-walking. Do you have any kind of, you know, physical evidence? Because you can appreciate this is kind of a complex story and we can't run it without fact-checking, and—”

Fleming stood up. “Okay.” He looked exasperated. “I got it.”

Steve peered up at him owlishly. “I don't want to blow you off. But you've got to see—they'll laugh me out of the meeting if I can't back this up with something physical. And this isn't my department. I'm not the desk editor you're looking for—”

Fleming nodded again, surprising him. “Okay. Look,” he glanced at his watch, “I'll phone you again after they make their move. I don't think we'll have long to wait. Remember what I said?”

Steve nodded back at him, deadpan. “Atom bombs.”

“You think I'm nuts. Well, I'm not. At least I don't
think
I am. But I can't afford to stick around right now. Let's just say, if a terrorist nuke goes off in one of our cities in the next week, I'll be in touch and we can talk again. Okay?”

“You got it.” Steve clicked his recorder off. “Where are you going?”

“That would be telling.” Fleming flashed him a feral grin, then ducked out of the cubicle. By the time Steve levered himself out of his chair and poked his head around the partition, he was gone.

“Who was that?” asked Lena from real estate, who was just passing with a coffee.

“J. Random Crank. Probably not worth worrying about—he seemed harmless.”

“You've got to watch them,” she said worriedly. “Sometimes they come back. Why didn't you call security?”

“I wish I knew.” Steve rubbed his forehead. The shrill buzz of his phone dragged him back inside the cubicle. He picked up the receiver, checking the caller ID: It was Tony in editorial. “Steve speaking, can I—”

“Turn on your TV,” Tony interrupted. Something in his tone made Steve's scalp crawl.

“What channel?” he demanded.

“Any of them.” Tony hung up. All around the office, the phones were going mad.
No, it can't be,
Steve thought, dry-swallowing. He moused over to the TV tuner icon on his desktop and double-clicked to open it. And saw:

*   *   *

Two lopsided mushroom clouds roiling against the clear blue sky before a camera view flecked with static, both leaning towards the north in the grip of a light breeze—

“Vehicles are being turned back at police checkpoints. Meanwhile, National Guard units—”

A roiling storm of dust and gravel like the aftermath of the collapse of the Twin Towers—

“Vice president, at an undisclosed location, will address the nation—”

A brown-haired woman on CNN, her normal smile replaced by a rictus of shock, asking someone on the ground questions they couldn't answer—

People, walking, from their offices. Dirty and shocked, some of them carrying their shoes, briefcases, helping their neighbors—

“Reports that the White House was affected by the attack cannot be confirmed yet, but surviving eyewitnesses say—”

A flashback view from a surveillance camera somewhere looking out across the Potomac,
flash
and it's gone, blink and you've missed it—

“Residents warned to stay indoors, keep doors and windows closed, and to drink only bottled—”

*   *   *

Minutes later Steve stared into the toilet bowl, waiting for his stomach to finish twisting as he ejected the morning's coffee grounds and bile.
I had him in my office,
he thought.
Oh Jesus.
It wasn't the thought that he'd turned down the scoop of a lifetime that hurt like a knife in the guts:
What if I'd listened to him?
Probably it had been too late already. Probably nothing could have been done. But the possibility that he'd had the key to averting this situation sitting in his cubicle, trying to explain everything with that slightly flaky twitch—the man who knew too much—that was too much to bear. Assuming, of course, that Fleming was telling the truth when he said he wasn't the guy behind the bombs.
That
needed checking out, for sure.

When he finally had the dry heaves under control he straightened up and, still somewhat shaky, walked over to the washbasins to clean himself up. The face that stared at him, bleary-eyed above the taps, looked years older than the face he'd shaved in the bathroom mirror at home that morning.
What have we done?
he wondered. The details were in the dictaphone; he'd zoned out during parts of Fleming's spiel, particularly when it had been getting positively otherworldly. He remembered bits—something about mediaeval antipersonnel mines, crazy stuff about prisoners with bombs strapped to their necks—but the big picture evaded him, like a slippery mass of jelly that refused to be nailed down, like an untangled ball of string. Steve took a deep breath.
I've got to get Fleming to call in,
he realized. A faint journalistic reflex raised its head:
It's the story of a lifetime.
Or the citizen's arrest of a lifetime.
Is a nuclear unabomber even possible?

J. Barrett Armstrong's office on the tenth floor was larger than Steve Schroeder's beige cubicle on the eighth. It had a corner of the building to itself, with a view of Faneuil Hall off to one side and a mahogany conference table the size of a Marine Corps helicopter carrier tucked away near the inner wall of the suite. It was the very image of a modern news magnate's poop deck, shipshape and shining with the gleaming elbow grease of a dozen minimum-wage cleaners; the captain's quarters of a vessel in the great fleet commanded by an Australian news magnate of some note. In the grand scheme of the mainstream media J. Barrett Armstrong wasn't so high up the totem pole, but in the grand scheme of the folks who signed Steve's paychecks he was right at the top, Thunderbird-in-chief.

Right now, J. Barrett Armstrong's office was crowded with managers and senior editors, all of whom were getting a piece of the proprietor's ear as he vented his frustration. “The fucking war's
over
,” he shouted, wadding up a printout from the machine in the corner and throwing it at the wall. “Who did Ali get the bomb from? There's the fricking story!” A bank of monitors on a stand showed the story unfolding in repeated silent flashbacks. “How did they smuggle them in? Go on, get digging!”

Nobody noticed Steve sneaking in until he tapped his boss, Riccardo Pirello, on the shoulder. Rick turned, distractedly: “What is it?”

“It's not Iraq,” said Steve. He swallowed. “It's narcoterrorists, and the nukes were stolen from our own inventory.”

The boss was belting out orders to his mates and boatswains: “Bhaskar, I want an in-depth on the Iranian nuclear program, inside spread, you've got six pages—”

Steve held up his dictaphone where Riccardo could see it. “Scoop, boss. Walked into my office an hour ago.”

“A—what the fuck—” Riccardo grabbed his arm.

Nobody else had noticed; all eyes were focussed on the Man, who was throwing a pocket tantrum in the direction of enemies both Middle Eastern and imaginary. “Let's find a room,” Steve suggested. “I've got my desk line patched through to my mobile. He's going to call back.”

“Who—”

“My source.” Steve's cheek twitched. “He told me this would happen. I thought he was crazy and kicked him out. He said he'd phone after it happened.”

“Jesus.” Riccardo stared at him for a moment. “Why
you
?”

“Friend of a friend. She went missing six months ago, investigating this, apparently.”

“Jesus. Okay, let's get a cube and see what you've got. Then if it checks out I'll try and figure out how we can break it to Skippy without getting ourselves shitcanned for making him look bad.”

*   *   *

The atmosphere in the situation room under Raven Rock was a toxic miasma of fury, loss, and anticipation: a sweaty, testosterone-breathing swamp of the will to triumph made immanent. From the moment the PINNACLE NUCFLASH alert came in, WARBUCKS hunched over one end of the cramped conference table, growling out a torrent of unanswerable questions, demanding action on HEAD CRASH and CLEANSWEEP and other more arcane Family Trade projects, issuing instructions to his staff, orders for the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate and other subagencies within the sprawling DHS empire. “We're still trying to raise the EOB, sir,” said one particularly hapless staffer.

“I don't want to hear that word
trying
,” snarled WARBUCKS. “I want
results
. Success or failure. Clear?”

The TV screens were clear enough. Andrew James couldn't help staring at the hypnotic rewind footage from time to time, the sunny morning view of downtown D.C., the flash and static-riddled flicker, the rolling, boiling cloud of chaotic darkness shot through with fire rising beyond the Capitol. The close-ups replaying every ten minutes of the Washington Monument blowdown, chunks of rock knocked clear out of the base of the spire as the Mach wave bounced off the waters of the reflecting pool, cherry trees catching fire in a thousand inglorious blazing points of light. Inarticulate anchormen and women, struggling with the enormity. Talking heads, eyes frozen in fear like deer in the headlights, struggling to pin the blame on Iraqi revenants, Iranian terrorists, everyone and anyone.
Northwoods,
he thought.
He made it work.
Nobody else in the national command structure had ever had the sheer brass balls to pull that particular trigger, to play power chords in the key of the Reichstag Fire on the instrument of state—

“Dr. James.”

He tore his eyes away from the screen. “Sir?”

WARBUCKS grinned humorlessly. “I want to know the status of SCOTUS as of this morning. I very much fear we'll be needing their services later today and I want to know who's available.”

James nodded. “I can find out. Do you want me to expedite the draft order on Family Trade just yet?”

“No, let's wait for confirmation. BOY WONDER will want to pull the trigger himself once we brief him, assuming he survived, and if not, I need to be sworn in first. Otherwise those bastards in Congress will—”

“Sir?” Jack Shapiro, off the NSA desk just outside the conference room, stuck his head round the door. “We've got eyeballs overhead right now, do you want it on screen?”

WARBUCKS nodded. “Wait one, Andrew,” he told Dr. James. “Put it on any damn screen but Fox News, okay?”

Two minutes later the center screen turned blue. Static replaced the CNN news crawl for a moment; then a grainy, gray, roiling turbulence filled the monitor from edge to edge. A flickery head-up display scrawled barely readable numbers across the cloudscape. Shapiro grimaced, his face contorted by the telephone handset clamped between neck and shoulder. “That's looking down on the Ellipse,” he confirmed. “The chopper's standing off at six thousand feet, two thousand feet south of ground zero—it's one of the VH-3s from HMX-1, it was on station at Andrews AFB when…” He trailed off. WARBUCKS was staring at the picture, face frozen.