The White Plague (41 page)

I know you, Shiloh Broderick, and I don’t trust you.

“Mister President,” Broderick said, “why did you invite me in here?”

“I’ve had some experience of trying to get through the political barricades, Shiloh, trying to reach the ear of someone who could ‘do something.’  I have some sense of your present situation.”

Broderick again leaned forward. “Sir, out there…” he pointed at the windows “. . . are people who know things you need to know. I represent some of the finest –”

“Shiloh, you’ve put your finger precisely on my problem. How do I find them? And having found them, how do I wade through and weed through what they bring?”

“You trust your friends!”

Velcourt sighed. “But, Shiloh, things presented to me… well, things excluded are often more important than things presented. I’m the President, now, Shiloh. My first resolution is to weed out the advisors who produce only drama. I’ll listen once in case they bring something new, but I don’t have time for old nonsense.”

Broderick heard dismissal in the President’s words and tone but refused to move.

“Mister President, I presume on past association. We go a long way back where –”

“Where I was often right and you were wrong.”

Broderick’s mouth drew into a tight line.

Velcourt spoke first: “Don’t assume that I hold grudges. We’ve no time for such nonsense. What I’m telling you is that I intend to rely on my own judgment. That’s the nature of this office. And the record shows that my judgment has been better than yours. You have one value to me, Shiloh – information.”

And Velcourt thought:
Does Shiloh suspect the real nature of the information he brought me today?
Broderick represented people who might act independently to endanger an extremely delicate balance. An upset in these times could lead to a planet empty of humans. Broderick’s people clearly were acting out of a context whose time had passed. Operation Backfire would have to be alerted.

Broderick’s lips moved against each other but did not part, then, he spoke in a tightly controlled voice: “We always said you weren’t a very good team player.”

“I’m glad to know you held such a high opinion of me. You’d do me a favor, Shiloh, if you went back to your people and told them that my opinion of our bureaucracy has not changed much.”

“I’ve never heard that opinion.”

“They made a fatal error, Shiloh. They tried to copy the Soviet model.” He raised a hand for silence as Broderick started to respond. “Oh, I know the reasons. But you take a better look at the Soviet example, Shiloh. They’ve created a bureaucratic aristocracy, recreated, I should say, because it’s patterned on the czarist model. You always did want to be an aristocrat, Shiloh. You just chose the wrong country in which to make the attempt.”

Broderick gripped the arms of his chair, knuckles white. His voice came out in barely controlled fury: “Sir, the intelligent ones must lead!”

“Who’s to be the judge of what’s intelligent, Shiloh? Was it intelligence got us into this mess? You see, aristocrats can bury their mistakes only so long as the mistakes are small enough.”

Velcourt lifted himself from the chair and spoke to the seated Broderick from the deeper shadows above the lamplight. “If you’ll excuse me, Shiloh, I have to go next door and see if I can detect what other mistakes we’re about to make.”

“And I’m no longer invited?”

“I’ve heard your argument, Shiloh.”

“So you’re not going to take advantage of…”

“I’ll take any and every advantage that I judge to be a real one! And that I judge does not endanger the primary concern – finding a cure for this plague. That’s why my door remains open to you, Shiloh, whenever time permits. Maybe you’ll bring me something useful.”

Velcourt turned and strode out of the room, unconsciously copying the purposeful stride he’d seen so many times in Adam Prescott. In the main hall, seeing one of his aides, Velcourt dictated a memo as they hurried toward the East Room.

The alternative to the Brodericks was not to bury himself in information
, he thought. No, the alternative was to surround himself with people who used their powers of observation the way he did. He knew a few such. They might know of more. This memo was a first step. The aware people would have to be found… the bright ones who were not afraid to report unpopular things.

Analysis in depth was a thing that had to happen outside the President’s presence. Perhaps that had been the need for a long time. It had taken the plague’s immediacy to supress all the drama-pushers and make this approach so obvious.

Broderick had been right on one thing, though: Find the right people. But when he found them, when he had digested their information and acted upon it, he had to make sure his orders were carried out. It was clear that the power of the people Broderick represented often transcended that of the transients who occupied the Oval Office. It even transcended the power of people in other offices, in the corner offices or in the large spaces at the ends of long halls lined with portraits of past transients. Bureaucrats came to recognize early a simple truth about their powers: “We will be here after the transients have been replaced by the electorate.”

Time was on their side.

Velcourt paused at the door to the East Room. Well, the plague had changed that, too. Time had only one use now – find the path to survival.

’Tis I that outraged Jesus of old;
’Tis I that robbed my children of
      heaven!
By rights ’tis I that should have gone
       upon the cross.
There would be no hell, there would
      be no sorrow,
There would be no fear if it were not
      for me.

– “Eve’s Lament,” an old Irish poem

T
HE ROAD
beneath John’s feet crested the ridge at the top of the valley much farther to the right of the slate-roofed mansion than he had expected. He could see a shallow swale on his right close with young pines, which thickened into taller pines at a higher crest beyond. At his left, a steep slope descended some fifty meters before gentling into a deep bowl perhaps a thousand meters across. The château, three stories high and with four levels to its roofline, nestled into a black rock elbow at the far side of the bowl. Sheep cropped the meadow grass in front of the building. A double line of poplars led in at an angle from far to the right, an overgrown lane between them. The poplars and a tall stand of evergreens partly concealed a deeper lawn beyond.

A wind from the west swayed the poplars and bent the tall grass growing up through the rock fence along the road beside John. He turned to look at his companions. Herity had put one foot on the rock fence and leaned forward on the upraised knee, listening. Father Michael and the boy stood near him, staring at the pastoral scene below them.

“Would you look at that now,” Herity said, his voice hushed.

Father Michael cupped a hand behind his left ear.

“Listen!”

John heard it then: the sounds of children playing – thin cries, excitement in the shouts.
A game
, he thought. He clambered onto the rock wall near Herity and stared off across the bowl toward the building. The sound came from beyond the poplars and the screening evergreens.

Herity removed his foot from the wall and trotted down the road until he was past the screening trees. John and the others hurried to follow.

Father Michael pulled Cannon’s gift binoculars out of his pack as he ran. He stopped and aimed them at the flat expanse of lawn revealed from this new position. The others stopped beside him.

John saw them now – children played on the lawn, kicking a ball. They wore white blouses and matching stockings, black shoes and… skirts! Dark skirts!

Herity reached a hand toward Father Michael. “Give me those binoculars!”

Father Michael passed them to Herity, who focused them on the players. His lips worked soundlessly as he looked, then: “Ahhh, the little beauties. The little beauties.” Slowly, Herity lowered the binoculars, then thrust them at John. “See what the Madman missed?”

With trembling hands, John focused the binoculars and aimed them at the lawn. The players were girls of about twelve to sixteen years of age. Their hair had been done into twin braids, which swung wide as they ran and twisted after the ball shouting, calling out to other players. Some of the girls, John noted, wore yellow armbands, some green. Two teams.

“A girls’ school?” John asked, his voice husky. He could sense the faint and distant stirring of O’Neill-Within, querulous movement that he knew had to be stilled.

“That’s Brann McCrae’s little dovecote,” Herity said. “Him as made this little place off limits to the Finn Sadal and others and, it being common knowledge that McCrae has at least five rocket launchers plus other assorted instruments of violence, the Military Council does not question his decree.”

The silent boy crowded close to Father Michael, his gaze intent on the lawn.

John lowered the binoculars and returned them to the priest, who proffered them to the boy, but the boy only shook his head.

“Is it really girls or is it boys dressed up as girls?” John asked.

“Girls and young women they are,” Herity said, “all preserved in Mister McCrae’s transplanted French château. Would you say that’s a French château, John?”

“It could be.” John was only conscious of his reply after he had spoken. He looked toward the building’s roof, visible over the treetops. Smoke trailed from four of the building’s chimneys. He could smell turf fires.

“Joseph, why have we come this way?” Father Michael asked, his voice trembling. “We must not go near that place. It’s certain sure we’re contaminated with the plague.”

“As are the soldiers guarding them,” Herity said. “But it’s isolation they have and we’ll see them through this patch alive. All the women of Ireland are not dead.”

“Who is this Brann McCrae?” John asked.

“The Croesus of imported farm machinery,” Herity said. “A rich man, himself as has big houses such as this and guns and, so I’m told, tough women to use them.” He turned away and, as he moved, a rifle shot sounded from the direction of the mansion. A bullet slammed into the rock wall beside him and went keening off in ricochet. Father Michael tumbled the boy to the road behind the wall. John ducked and found his arm gripped, Herity dragging him across the road. They rolled across the opposite wall as another bullet hit behind them. Father Michael and the boy squirmed across the road, crossed the wall and joined Herity and John. They lay in heavy grass above the shallow, pine-filled swale John had noted earlier.

John listened. The sounds of girls at play were gone. A masculine voice barked a one-word command in the distance, the ringing sound of a bullhorn amplifier in it:

“Inside!”

“They’re only warning us off,” Father Michael said.

“Not Brann McCrae,” Herity said. He peered into the swale and the ridge beyond it. “Follow me.” Keeping his head low, Herity ran down the shallow hill into the pines, crashing through branches, turning to present his shoulder to the worst of the obstructions.

John and the others followed. John’s arms and shoulders were slapped and buffeted by springing limbs.

“In here!” Herity called.

They burst through a screen of limbs to a small clearing with cottage-size outcroppings of granite in its center. Herity dove behind the rocks, the others with him. They lay panting on grass that smelled of dust and flint. Father Michael crossed himself. The boy cowered against the priest.

“Why are we running?” John asked.

“Because I know Mister McCrae,” Herity said.

Silence settled over the clearing, then a hissing roar sounded from the mansion’s valley. A deafening explosion erupted at the road they had just quit. Black shards of road surface and rock showered the area.

Herity looked at Father Michael. “He doesn’t cooperate, that Brann McCrae.”

John’s ears were ringing from the explosion. He put his hands over them and shook his head. O’Neill-Within had stirred to something near wakefulness. Explosions were only bombs to him, not rockets. Bombs killed your loved ones.

“You have no loved ones left,” John muttered.

“What was that?” Herity asked.

John lowered his hands. “Nothing.” He could feel O’Neill-Within returning to quiescence but there was no solace in this respite. What if O’Neill-Within should come out fully in Herity’s presence? That would be disaster.

“We must get away from here,” Father Michael said.

Herity raised a hand for silence. He stared off into the pines to the north. A limb cracked there and something large could be heard moving through the branches. Herity pointed at John’s pocket and mouthed the word: “Pistol.” Placing a finger to his lips, his machine gun cradled close to his chest, Herity crept off toward the sound, wriggling along under the branches. He was lost from view within only a few heartbeats.

John slipped the pistol from his pocket and stared after Herity. He felt foolish. What good was this little peashooter against a rocket launcher? There was no more sound of the large something moving through the pines.

Father Michael had found a rosary and fingered the beads, his lips moving. The boy had pulled his head almost completely into his anorak.

The silence dragged out – oppressive, weighted. John crept forward past the priest and turned until he could sit up with his back against the warm rock of the outcropping. The low pines were directly in front of him only a few paces away, tall brown grass in the foreground, thick green limbs beyond. It was an almost perfect screen to conceal anything outside the clearing.

A masculine voice shouted from up toward the ridge on his right. John could detect no word in the sound. He felt exposed here, set out as a target for anyone in the concealment of the trees. John lifted the revolver and cocked it. Sounds of movement in the pines – Herity?

“Yank!” It was Herity’s voice. “It’s friends. We’re coming in.”