Tintagel (26 page)

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely. Randell sent out the CIA to case the ranch. They searched the house, illegally I might add, and even tried to confiscate the tape and wafer library." He gestured over her shoulder toward Christy's office. "But since I'm Fran's lawyer and such, I told them that if he was dead, all the property would be in probate since it wasn't government owned and that even under martial law there still was no reason for them to confiscate personal property."

Lanier grinned. "Shyster. What'd they do?"

"Well, they apparently bought it. Somehow they did manage to lift the Roy Harris wafer while you were still under. They probably did it during the original search."

Lanier stared. "That's interesting."

Yes," Katie interrupted, tugging off her bonnet, catching on quickly. "Don't you see? Without the wafer, you wouldn't be able to get at me. I would be trapped in whatever place I was."

Her eyes, glowed. Lanier did see. Perhaps had seen all along.

Christy came back into the living room with a tray of coffee cups and a pot of coffee and said, "But we had an extra copy of the wafer pressed just in case, and that case turned up. They think that Charlie and I just live here now."

Lanier nodded. Everything made sense in its own perverted way.

"So they think you might still make an appearance," Charlie concluded. "That's why they have the helicopter out. They'll probably visit us again soon, though. Randell's too cagey."

Charlie drew the curtains closed.

They all began eating the club sandwiches Christy had prepared. Lanier questioned them both.

"So what did the two of you come up with? Things should be fairly obvious to you by now."

They looked at each other. Katie ate in silence, her eyes focused intently on Lanier.

As if it would help him explain things, Charlie began rolling up the long sleeves of his cowboy shirt. He snapped the pearl studs of his cuffs and slowly peeled them back onto his forearms.

"Well, it looks like this. Randell has been manipulating events all along. It's my guess that he was the one who leaked your identity and your Malibu home to the press. I can't prove that, but he's the only one who could, really. And he's the only one who might want to."

Katie watched. There was a vengeful, dangerous look in her eyes. Her personal power was returning from the shock of the Syndrome. She was, after all, the President of the United States. It would be best to wait things out. These were true allies, she realized.
That asshole Albertson
…

Charlie continued. "Through DataCom—before Randell halted the information flow for security reasons—we found out that a great deal of Randell's personal fortune comes through the movie studios he owns. All of this wasn't ever made public, so we dug deeper. One of the studios he owns is the White Condor." He looked evenly at Lanier. "It's the one that Ellie Estevan had her contract with. And it's safe to assume that all the prints of her films come out of the factory ingrained with the Leander Interphase process. How he got hold of it is still a mystery to us, but he's old enough to have been in a position, politically, to look into it. He was twenty-nine when Leander disappeared."

"Leander process?" Katie asked with a mouthful of tuna sandwich. She was famished. "What the hell's that? What are you talking about?"

Lanier turned toward her on the couch.

"Well, last night I drove into Missoula to see one of Ellie Estevan's movies, called
Halcyon Days
. You may have heard of it. Anyway, I had already seen it privately in my own home some time ago. But the prints the studios so graciously gave Charlie were just ordinary celluloid prints."

"So? What's this about the Leander process?"

"I'm getting to that. Years ago, many years ago actually, Alex Leander, a technician working out of MIT, invented a means whereby a person could manipulate the emotional responses of an audience through certain high frequencies mixed in with the voicetrack or soundtrack of a film or video tape. You wouldn't even notice what was happening to you. But you'd find yourself responding very enthusiastically to the movie you were viewing or the speech you were listening to on television. You'd laugh louder at a television comedy, or cry harder at a drama, whether or not the acting or the direction or film editing provoked it. Originally, I understand, he pioneered the process for use in video only, and not the movies."

"Right," Charlie agreed. "Then they arrested him and the government confiscated the works. What they told the public was that the whole business was a mistake, a hoax, that no one should pay any attention to it."

Lanier continued. "So, I drove into town to see Ellie's movie, and I could feel the vibrations that were coming from the film score, even though no one else in the theater could. I imagine they just thought they were seeing a very powerful movie."

"What a weapon," Katie said firmly. She now understood many things she hadn't previously.

"I need a cigarette," she commanded.

They all looked at each other, embarrassed. No cigarettes. She brooded, thinking that it was a nasty habit anyway.

"It does explain a lot of things, but not everything," Lanier started.

"Like what?" Katie asked.

Lanier turned inward for a brief instant, recalling Ellie's special eyes, the innocence of her face. He was glad he had abandoned the Watson Pueblo Theater when he did. He couldn't have survived
Halcyon Days
. He knew what followed in the film. And he knew what followed in the real world.

Lanier moved close to Katie where they sat on the couch. "Katie, what was between Senator Randell and yourself? I'm sorry to get personal with you, but this has gone beyond the boundaries of our private lives."

At first she felt uncomfortable, but then she realized that he was right. For all his political naiveté, he was right.
He's a good old boy
, she thought.

"We've had an affair, off and on, for the last ten years."

Charlie Gilbert and Christy looked on, awed.

"That's right," Katie continued. "It would've ruined us both, ruined our careers, but it just went on and on. I'm surprised that it stayed out of the scandal sheets for as long as it did. I guess we were lucky."

"Or careful," Lanier remarked.

She lost herself to her own musings. "I wonder," she said, "what it was that Albertson put in my drink."

"What?" Lanier asked, puzzled. "What drink?"

"At the concert, just before it began, we all had drinks with the new symphony director and his staff. I'll bet Albertson put something in my drink, that bastard. He wanted me out of the way."

Fire sparkled in her eyes.

Lanier was somewhat taken by this woman at his side. She was
the
power in the United States, and it showed in her character. It was in her eyes, her face. She was used to power, and understood what it made people do.

"So, with the millions—perhaps billions—he is raking in from the world movie industry with this stolen process, as President, or acting President, Albertson Randell is the most powerful man in the world," Lanier said.

"Well." Katie stood up imperially, resolute. "I'll put an end to this nonsense once and for all."

"No," Lanier said.

They looked at him. Katie stood still.

"Not just yet. There are more unanswered questions facing us besides what Randell is going to do now that he is on the throne."

Katie watched him.
This is a Staiker speaking
, she realized. His face was dirty and lined with exhaustion. He looked as if he'd just walked out of the mouth of Hell.
But those eyes
…

He continued. "Have any of you wondered why the Syndrome is mutating so rapidly, and why North Haven Chemicals—or any other pharmaceutical corporation—hasn't come up with a cure?"

They were silent. Charlie, though, was nodding, following Lanier's reasoning.

Then Katie said to them, "Maybe there is a cure."

"Exactly," Lanier said. "Or Albertson Randell would've gone under once again. He's not stable at all. It's my guess that Perry Eventide was the one to stumble onto it. Baktropol is the first step. A cure couldn't have been too far beyond that. Listen." He gestured emphatically. "If they can now cure most forms of cancer, it shouldn't be too difficult to find a cure for a bacterium."

"Now, Fran, wait a minute," Charlie pointed out. "Medicine is a bit more complicated than that. If the Chinese couldn't come up with a cure for the Syndrome, why do you think we could?"

"Because all events point to it. In the first place, Atlanta and the Center for Disease Control are still intact. Their facilities are just as good as those at North Haven Chemicals. And second, that insurrection they're having now in China has brought all science and technology to a standstill." He paused, gesturing with a small wedge of a club sandwich. "No, what I mean is this. DataCom shows that Randell is a silent partner in North Haven Chemicals. Though he's not allowed to overtly support any legislation in their favor, he's nonetheless interested in the company's financial success. He could easily, though surreptitiously, divert funds or information from Atlanta to North Haven. And, if you recall, the company owns the worldwide distributing franchise on Baktropol,
and
the sole rights to its manufacture."

"He has the world by the balls, so to speak." Katie remarked,

"You could say so, yes." Lanier looked at her.

Katie sat back. "Then he simply used a dose of something that counteracted the Baktropol I had taken earlier. He would have access to a number of drugs like that. It could've been anything."

"It has even occurred to me," Lanier then said, "that they might be in some way responsible for the mutations of the Syndrome, but that would be nearly impossible to prove, even if North Haven did have the facilities for controlled recombinant DNA experiments. The disease, after all, is global."

"So now," Charlie interrupted, "Randell and his group will give everyone the cure, right?"

Katie glared at him. "Of course not. He'd be stupid to. That's what will keep everyone in line. As long as they have a cure for the Syndrome, or a stronger preventative, they'll keep it to themselves with everyone hanging on. As long as Albertson keeps everyone believing that the nation is suffering from a crisis, the people will willingly play into his hands."

Everyone was silent for a few minutes.

Lanier peeked through the curtains. He couldn't see the helicopter. Only the early winter light was falling on the Bitterroot Mountains. The whole thing seemed like an extended nightmare, almost like one of the worlds into which a patient might have fallen. Except
he
was the patient.

He went into the other room to change his clothes.

Essentially, he wanted to be alone for a few minutes to think about what was going on around him. The eyes of Ellie Estevan still haunted him, now that he had the President's rescue behind him.
Those incredible eyes, that smile
.

He had told himself—almost as many times as he had repeated his own mantra—that he would never again fall for a woman. At least, not in the way he had for Marie back in Los Angeles years ago. Now, everything was being mixed together, his personal life with his public duties and knowledge.
Everything is connected
, as Two Moons once said.

And now Randell was out to make sure that he was dead or effectively out of the way. He realized that reinstating Katie Babcock to the presidency was only a matter of a phone call to Ken Collins and the Pentagon.
That
was no problem.

But the weight of the national circumstances bore on him as if he had suddenly become an unwitting beast on a treadmill: each time he returned to the real world, things were worse off than they had been. Aeroplankton. Wars. World temperature rising. Disease. Diminishing resources.

He recalled the remark of the astronomer he had not brought back a few weeks ago.
Maybe his world was best
.…

He pulled off his tunic. He looked at himself in the mirror.
You're getting old, cowboy. Old
. He always thought that getting old would never become a problem, that there'd always be someone to help him out.

But not Marie. Not Ellie Estevan.

At that moment, Lanier suddenly recalled what Charlie had just said only a few moments previously. That Randell owned the studios that Ellie had worked for.

He ran into the living room.

"Charlie," he said, shirtless and excited. "Christy, listen. Did they identify Floyd Matkin's escort at that party during the summit?"

Charlie set down his coffee cup. "Yes, they did. I thought you knew."

"Who was it?"

Christy looked at him. Charlie spoke. "Ellie Estevan. She was all over Europe at the time. Wasn't it in the report?"

"
Jesus
," Lanier swore. "It all makes sense now—God, does it make sense!"

"What are you talking about?" Charlie asked.

Katie Babcock watched.

Lanier ran back into Christy's office. He punched on the light. They followed him inside.

"How much of the national data base has Randell shut down?"

Christy said, "Anything pertaining to national security, which means DataCom. That would include industry, transportation, all of the utilities, and all of the access to communication information."

"But not business. Not HomeCom channels."

"Of course not. He'd be crazy to debilitate the country's source of income. There may be martial law, but people are still going to have to go to work."

Lanier smiled thinly. There was no mirth to his smile.

"Good," he said, sitting at the console. Thumbing it on, he keyed in his own private code for access to HomeCom.

"What are you doing?" Charlie asked.

"There are a few things we never found out about just why Eventide and Matkin died."

Katie Babcock leaned through Christy and Charlie, glancing over Lanier's bare shoulders. "What do you have in mind?"

"Well, I've assumed all along that they perished through some sort of death wish of their own. But there was always a dreamling present."