Without Warning (60 page)

“Inward,” he said without hesitation. “At least in the short term. Command and control of the Chinese state is failing. Has failed. This is about
reestablishing that control, but it won’t be simple or easy or something that happens very quickly. Like the colonel said, they have hundreds of millions of people who might well starve to death in the next few weeks. Jumping across the strait will not change that. It will simply make dealing with it all the more difficult, and at any rate, the chain of command is broken. They can only fight among themselves, for now.”

“Okay,” said Franks. “That’ll do for the wrap-up. Let’s start grinding our way through the to-do list, shall we?”

They met privately during a break in the all-day conference.

Franks joined Ritchie in his office, where they shared a cup of powdered coffee. There wasn’t a drop of the real stuff to be had on the islands.

“This French business, we’re gonna have to do something about it,” said Franks. “I wouldn’t have believed it when you first told me, but this latest intelligence from the Brits nails it. We have to get that girl out.”

Ritchie drained the last of his lukewarm java and pondered the view out of his window. Another beautiful Hawaiian day. It seemed perverse, given the state of the world, but he knew that even out there, things were going badly. Most of the island’s nonresidential population had already been moved on to resettlement facilities elsewhere in the Pacific. Almost none had volunteered to return to the mainland.

“Well, it explains a lot,” said Ritchie. “Especially about what Blair has done, I suppose. How are we going to get her? She’s dropped off the grid.”

Franks shook his head.

“We’ve found her again. Sarkozy’s people grabbed her up an hour ago.”

Jed had scored himself three adjoining rooms at the Hotel Monaco, and standing in the center suite, trying to listen to a CNN report out of the constitutional convention, he wondered if he should have grabbed a couple of spares for the overflow. There had to be more than a hundred people in here. The roar of such a crowd so closely confined was loud enough to bury the sound of the television unless you knelt down in front of the set and jacked up the volume. He’d done that a couple of times, but within a few minutes the background noise had simply grown in response.

Dozens of people pressed in close around him, trying to listen to the report, but their own cries of outrage drowned out the TV just as effectively as the background roar. On the screen a doughy-faced man with an unfortunate comb-over banged his fist on a podium and yelled, “It would only be temporary … a three-year sunset clause, with … extension
only
if the emergency requires it. But we need … measure now. We face annihilation without…”

A small band of type flashed up identifying him as Reggie Guertson, whom Jed now knew as a GOP mayor from some pissant burg out holding its breath right up against the edge of the Wave.

“The military got us through the worst of this,” yelled an increasingly redfaced
Guertson, “and they’ll get us through the worst that is to come. But only if we give them what they need to get the job done.”

“He’s a poet and don’t know it,” cried out one of the hecklers behind Jed.

Onscreen, the camera panned around and the auditorium erupted with fierce catcalling and jeers, but Jed estimated that at least half of the howls of protest were directed against anyone who’d objected to Guertson’s proposal to reserve a third of the new congressional seats for the armed forces. As an emergency measure.

The reaction behind him, in the hotel room, was uniformly negative. Deafeningly so. Nobody here was backing the idea. Jed frowned and tried to get some more volume out of the television, but it seemed to have been programmed by the hotel to prevent inconsiderate or hard-of-hearing guests from annoying their neighbors. He could just make out a rising cacophony as Guertson attempted to shout down a sizable chorus that was chanting over and over again,
“Sieg Heill Sieg Heill.
” The image cut to a shot of the convention chairman, the newly elected Anchorage mayor Mark Begich, banging his gavel and calling for order, entirely without effect.

Culver shook his head and pushed himself up to his feet. His knees hurt, and he felt a little giddy, probably from all the smoke in the room.

All three suites were choked with cigarette smoke, despite all the nonsmoking signs, and the whole space reeked of wet clothes, body odor, rebreathed air, and stale farts. The carpets had disappeared under an inch-thick mat of crushed potato chips and pizza crust, and every flat surface was full of empty bottles and paper cups. Clear plastic bottles of spring water stood next to crushed cans of Canadian beer. He wondered sometimes how many people were here simply because he had a proven supply of snack foods and free beverages.

Well, not free.

There was nothing so gauche as a cover charge to get into Jed Culver’s lair, but everyone in these rooms would pay a price for being here. Sometime, somewhere.

“Hey, Culver. Been looking for you.”

He turned, looking for the owner of the harsh Brooklyn accent. Or Brooklyn by way of Warsaw, to Jed’s well-traveled hearing.

“Mr. Cesky,” he called back, over the din. “I’ve been looking for you, too. Wanted to thank you for your help yesterday.”

Cesky, a short, thick-shouldered man with the hardened hands and beaten-down features of somebody who’d worked construction all his life, waved him off with one hairy, bandaged paw.

“Nah. Fuggedaboudit,” he said. “What’s money for if you can’t fuckin’ spend it to get what you want?”

Jed smiled but said nothing. For all of Cesky’s two-fisted roughneck routine, he’d found him to be quite a shrewd operator. A hard nut, his old man would have called him. Not likely to crack under the hammer. The businessman was covered in suture marks and bandages from whatever misadventures he’d endured getting himself and his family out of southern Mexico. Cesky had said nothing to Jed, but the lawyer had done his background work before taking the man’s favors, and he knew that after a couple of failed attempts, Henry Cesky had pulled off a remarkable escape from Acapulco, right in the middle of the city melting down. He had to have some kind of smarts, and he was obviously tough enough to have come through intact if not unharmed.

Like all men, however, he was cursed with his own particular weaknesses.

That crack about the money, for instance. That wasn’t just for Jed’s benefit, reminding him how much credit he’d poured into the lawyer’s “discretionary account,” his black-bag fund, for want of a gentler euphemism. It also let everyone within hearing distance know that Henry Cesky was no fucking chump. Henry Cesky had somehow managed to salvage a good deal of his personal fortune and what was left of his business, and Henry fucking Cesky was still a fucking player. Especially by the much-reduced standards of the American politics, as it was now being played out in the surviving seat of power, the Pacific Northwest.

He slipped one of his heavy arms around Jed’s shoulder. With Cesky’s shirtsleeves rolled up, Jed could feel the thick mat of gorilla fur on the man’s forearm tickling the back of his neck. He ignored it. Getting inside your personal space was a favored ploy of Cesky’s, and as Jed had about four inches and a good number of pounds on him, he let it slide.

“What I wanted to talk to you about was them fucking army engineers,” said Cesky. “They’re doing a lot of work for the city at the moment and I can’t help thinking that it could be done a lot fucking quicker and cheaper by the private sector, you know. By people who don’t need to cross every fucking ‘i’ and dot every fucking ‘t’ if you know what I mean.”

Jed didn’t correct him. He knew what the construction magnate meant.

“I hear you, Henry,” he bellowed back. “I’m a hundred percent behind you on that. But for now, at least, the army’s a law unto themselves here. You’ve seen that. They’re still running this place, really.”

And Jed had to wonder at that, given what he’d been hearing about relations between the city and Fort Lewis over the last month.

Cesky took his arm away. He’d had to reach up a ways, and it couldn’t have been comfortable for him.

“Well, they need to get back in their fucking box,” he said. “Or someone needs to put them there. I heard about what they did with the council guys. Playing the fucking heavy like that. No fucking wonder they got the contracts locked up for this joint, eh?”

Jed wanted to shake his head in amazement. Another Henry Cesky weakness was a complete inability to see the world in terms other than his own. He honestly regarded the army as little more than a rival firm, undercutting him on his bids for city work. In their position, it’s what he would have done, so obviously that’s what they’d been doing when they “sequestered” the local councillors during the worst of the immediate crisis following the Disappearance. They were simply looking to do Cesky out of a buck.

Un-fucking-believable.

Jed held up both palms.

“No argument from me, Henry. I can see why they moved the way they did at first. It was probably the only way to keep things together here. But we’re past that now, aren’t we?”

Cesky nodded sagely, or in a manner that he obviously thought of as “sagely,” if he even knew what the word meant.

“Fucking lotta work to be done here, Culver,” he said as they threaded their way through the heaving crush and heat of the crowd. “Not just spade-work neither. There’s a lot of rebuilding up here, too,” he added, tapping the side of his head with two thick fingers.

Culver nodded, a little surprised at his insight.

“That’s why this week is important,” said Jed. “It’s why we need guys like you on our side, Henry. Things are at the tipping point, if you ask me. Could go either way. We could fuck this up, end up with Fort Lewis running everything, doing guys like you out of a job, or we could make a whole new start. And all this bullshit about giving the army seats in any government. That would be fucking things up, don’t you think? That’s Third World stuff.”

Cesky nodded vigorously. He grabbed a bottle of Molson Old Style Pil-sener off a tray as it wobbled past at eye level. Whether he bought Jed’s argument as a point of high principle, or whether he saw his main chance being ruined by his major competitors getting their camouflaged butts into Congress was a moot point. From Jed Culver’s point of view, Henry Cesky was an ally because like everyone else in this room, he was firmly in the “no” camp when it came to the question of rewriting the Constitution.

“I dunno what these assholes are so frightened of,” declared Cesky. “I don’t see anywhere dealing with the fucking Wave as good as us, and we got
hammered flat by the fucker. Look at them French assholes, killing each other in the street. Fucking China, falling apart like a cheap fucking toy. And England, it’s a fucking prison camp. None of that happened here, and never will, unless we let it.”

Jed could have argued with him about some of the prison-camp aspects of post-Disappearance Seattle, but he let it go.

“Good man,” he said, as he slapped Cesky hard on the back. “That’s the spirit. Question is, though, what are we going to do about it? What are
you
going to do about it, Henry? The days when we could leave this stuff to the insiders and the Beltway crowd are over. Those assholes are gone. Well, mostly gone. There’s a few of them hanging around like farts in a phone booth at the convention, let me tell you. But that just means we’ve got to step up.
You
have to.”

“Hey, I’m doing my bit. I’m here, aren’t I!”

“Yeah, but it’s going to take more than standing around flapping our gums, Henry,” said Culver, steering the smaller man into a makeshift alcove formed by a couple of a couches. He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Might come a time soon when we have to act,” he said. “How would you feel about that?”

“What do you mean, act? You mean break some fucking heads? If that’s what it takes, Culver. That’s what it takes.”

“Oh I’m sure it won’t come to that,” said Jed, moving again toward the door connecting two of the hotel suites. “There’s no point butting heads with the army. You’ll lose. But it’s good to know, Henry, that if push comes to shove in some other way, we have you and your organization behind us.”

Cesky stood a little taller and nodded emphatically.

“Six hundred guys I got on my payroll, Culver. Six hundred families I’m keeping fed and housed and warm at night. I’m fucking proud o’ that, you know. It’s not just about the money or my own family. It’s what I can do for others. You need me to get out the vote, it’s out. You need boots on the street, you got ‘em. They’re my people. They know who looks after them, and they know who’s been trying to take food from their fucking tables, too.”

Cesky frowned and waved his beer at a TV in the next suite.

Through a shifting mass of bodies, Jed could just make out somebody on the screen, wearing an army uniform.

“Mr. Culver. Mr. Culver.”

He gratefully embraced the distraction. Looking for an excuse to break free of Cesky, Jed craned his head around searching for whoever was calling his name. Unfortunately the builder saw the guy first.