Without Warning (79 page)

Caitlin pitched over and vomited.

“Son of a bitch,” she grunted, struggling to regain her feet.

The volume of fire downstairs was deafening, drowned out only by the deep bass percussion of exploding grenades on the ground floor. The boards beneath her shook and shuddered so much she feared they might collapse. And still she couldn’t get up. Her head spun as though she’d stepped off a fairground ride, and she could not control her weapon anymore. Two figures appeared at the top of the stairs, one of them the squat, powerful outline of Dr. Noo.

He raised his weapon, a FAMAS assault rifle, at her and cried “Allahu Akbar!” just before his face exploded and he toppled backward onto the man behind him.

“Quick, come with me!”

The voice. Coming from above her. It was unfamiliar, but unmistakably American.

“Who the fuck … ? “

She gagged and choked again on a mouthful of bile and toppled sideways as she tried to stand.

“Can’t go,” she protested. “My target.”

“Leave him!”

The stranger, the man upstairs, leaped down beside her, stripped the MP-5 from her grip, and wrested a fresh magazine from the utility belt. He swapped out the mag in the dark without trouble and moved over to the stairs to fire down on any approaching attackers. Three more grenades exploded in close succession and the uproar of automatic fire became unbearable.

Caitlin felt herself falling away into darkness.

No civilized man should ever be awake at this hour, thought Jed, as he waited in the darkened office for his last meeting of the night. Not unless he had a bottle of good champagne in one hand and couple of exotic dancers in the other.

He stayed away from the window, by habit now, but there wasn’t that much to see.

The city center was in darkness save for a few buildings running on generators, one of them his own hotel, a few blocks away to the south. The never-ending caucus would still be in session there, as his delegates—he did think of them as his now—worked the phones and counted heads as they attempted to stave off defeat in the morning’s vote.

But they would be defeated.

Jed Culver had stolen enough votes in his time to know when the situation was hopeless. The Putsch were going to get their amendments up. They were going to turn the United States government into something like a Third World junta. He shook his head at his own incompetence in not foreseeing this and aborting it at conception. But looking back, he could understand. He’d been so focused on his own, much humbler agenda that he simply had
not been prepared for the depth of feeling, the visceral fear that had infected everything here in a way it hadn’t back in Hawaii. That was understandable. You couldn’t see the Wave in Hawaii. You didn’t live every minute with the prospect of it moving and just eating you alive.

He should have factored that in.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men,” he muttered to himself, “which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune—but omitted, and all the voyage of your life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

“What’s that, Jed?”

Culver turned around and was surprised to find a thin man, silhouetted in the doorway by the light of a small handheld phone. Two larger men, instantly recognizable as bodyguards, loomed a discreet distance behind him.

“Just mangling the bard, Bill,” he said. “It always helps me when creeping murmur and the poring dark, fills the wide vessel of the universe.”

Bill shrugged.

“Me, I like to read or play bridge. Golf’s pretty good, too. But not at this time of night.”

“No,” said Culver, who hadn’t been expecting anyone like this. The others he’d met tonight had all been anonymous people. Quiet men and women.

“So … ah …”

The figure snickered in the gloom.

“I really threw you for a doozy, didn’t I? Coming here, I mean.”

Jed nodded.

“Yes, you did. I was expecting someone … lower down the food chain.”

“Someone expendable?”

“If you like.”

The man walked into the room. His bodyguards remained in the corridor.

“This is important, Jed. I have a lot invested in this venture. We all do. If it fails we’re sunk. If it plays out, who knows, maybe people will remember us hundreds of years from now. Assuming there’s anybody left, of course.”

Culver shrugged. “People would remember you anyway.”

“Not for something as cool as this, Jed. This is the sort of thing that ends up in oil paintings. Like Paul Revere’s ride. It’s that important.”

Culver couldn’t argue with that.

“You did bring your phone, right?” asked Bill.

Jed pulled it out of his suit pocket and handed it over. The man’s face was underlit by the glow of the screen as he keyed in a series of codes.

“Okay,” he said, as the smart phone beeped. “The network is active.”

“And secure?”

“And secure.”

Jed thanked him as he took the phone back. He opened the message window and pressed a few buttons. A single hard-encrypted message beamed out across the city to hundreds of identical devices.

“It’s done,” he said. “It’s happening.”

Most of the delegates at the convention had succumbed to the lack of air-conditioning and removed their jackets, loosened ties, and in some case even removed them altogether. The atmosphere in the auditorium was sour, hot and rank, although partly that had to do with the split on the floor that was threatening to tear the whole process apart. Kipper pressed his lips together and tried to maintain his calm as some asshole from Spokane attempted to tell him how to do his job.

“This isn’t how we would run things, let me tell you, Kipper. We’d have had this show wrapped up days ago, and there wouldn’t have been any of this school camp bullshit with lights out and no air, either. How the hell do you expect people to make decisions under these conditions? It is impossible.”

Kipper’s jaw moved like he was chewing gum, which he wasn’t. It was simply an old habit. He folded his arms and resisted the urge tell this … Malcolm Vusevic, according to his name tag … that he was full of shit because Spokane, lying behind the Wave, wouldn’t be organizing anything ever again.

He kept his mouth shut though, because in his experience, people who’d hailed from the dead zone tended to be a little sensitive about it, which was only reasonable. What wasn’t reasonable was the delegates demanding that they get special treatment over and above what the rest of the city could expect.

“Not gonna happen, sir,” said Kipper, resolutely shaking his head. “Redmond, Finn Hill, and North Creek are all on their allotted power-ups at the moment. If you want to turn up the air-con here, it means diverting grid power from those folks. I’m not going to do it. Not on your say-so.”

“Well, on whose, then?” Vusevic demanded to know. “Would an order from General Blackstone do it for you?”

“Nope.” Kipper shook his head equably. “I work for the city, not the military. Leastways not yet.”

He instantly regretted the indiscretion. Vusevic’s eyes lit up in triumph.

“Oh I see, one of those anarchists, eh? You’re just doing this to delay the inevitable. What’s a matter, buddy? Don’t like losing a vote? Can’t handle democracy?”

Kipper’s shoulders and arms ached with the tension building up in them as he restrained a violent urge to beat this idiot into a pulp.

“None of my business, sir. City utilities are my business. And you’re not getting any extra power.”

With that he turned and walked away from the delegate from Spokane, wondering how the fuck anyone from Spokane got a ticket here in the first place. All Vusevic represented was a burned-out ruin of urban wasteland.

“Whoa
there, Nelly. You’re gonna throw a shoe, stomping off like that.”

Kipper pulled up at the sight of Jed Culver, who’d just emerged from the crush around the refreshment table. He seemed to live there, and it was taking its toll. The guy looked like he hadn’t slept. His face was puffy, and dark bags hung under his eyes.

“Sorry, Jed. Not today, man. I’ve got a world of fucking hurt on my shoulders.”

“Who doesn’t, Kip? Who doesn’t? Just a word in your shell-like. Won’t take a minute.”

Kipper frowned at the odd phrasing, until he remembered that Culver had worked in London for a couple of years. Or he said he had. Sometimes with Jed you were never quite sure when he was feeding you a line. He sighed, exhausted. He really was buried by work, and being called down to the conference floor to get reamed out over the air-conditioning hadn’t improved his mood. He hadn’t slept last night, after the Gestapo, as Barb called them, had left. Partly because Barney had stayed for another three hours, attempting to win him over to the cause. His friend had left just before dawn, in a police cruiser of all things.

“Not everyone in uniform wants to be the Führer,” Barney explained, winking, before he disappeared.

Kipper shook off Jed’s guiding hand and continued on his way to the exit.

The lawyer fell in beside him, not saying anything. Grinning and waving at the other delegates as he passed them, even those Kip knew for a fact he hated. How the hell he did that was a mystery for the ages. When James Kipper didn’t like someone they didn’t die wondering.

“You going back to your office?” asked Jed, as they left the auditorium behind.

“Yes, I am, but…”

“Great. I’ll come with you. Come on.”

“Don’t you want to be here for the vote? It’s on soon, isn’t it?”

“Already lost that one, Kip. So no, I have other plans, my friend, come on.”

He reluctantly allowed Culver to tag along with him, mostly because he knew the man was congenitally incapable of taking no for an answer. He
could blow him off, but by the time he reached his office many floors above, this expensively suited fixer would be waiting in his chair with a big, dumb grin on his face.

“That doesn’t sound like you, Jed, giving up because you can’t win.”

“Who says I’m giving up?”

Kipper spared him a glance and was disturbed by the wolfish smile he found there.

“What’s happening, Jed? This really isn’t the morning for it.”

“No. That’s where you’re wrong, Kip. This is very much the morning for it. This is the morning the American people, what’s left of ‘em, God help us, take back their government.”

They entered the elevator, which Kipper had tried to shut down without success—the city councillors had balked at that power-saving measure—and Jed punched in the number for his floor, smiling graciously and using his arm to bar the way of a young woman who’d rushed up behind them to share the ride.”

“Sorry, darlin’. Do you mind?”

She did, but there was nothing to be done about it as the doors slid shut.

Kipper bristled at the impoliteness.

“That wasn’t very nice, Jed. And it was wasteful. And what are you crapping on about anyway? You already said you were going down in that vote this morning. Blackstone is gonna get his congressmen, whether the rest of the army wants them or not.”

Jed put a finger to his lips before gesturing around the elevator. Kip sighed with exasperation, but after last night he wasn’t so quick to dismiss paranoid speculation about surveillance.

The lawyer nodded.

“Well, you’re right about one thing. Not all of the military wants this situation. Ritchie and Franks are dead against it.”

Culver looked around as if addressing an unseen audience.

“And nobody in uniform is arguing in favor of it, of course. But in the end they’ll accede to the wishes of the people.”

“But people don’t want this,” Kipper said without thinking. “Some people maybe. But not everyone. This is just fear and craziness.”

“Well, fear whispers loudly downstairs, my friend. Come on.”

A bell dinged as the elevator came to a stop at his floor. Kip made to step out and head for his office, but Culver grabbed his arm and directed him toward another.

“I had this one swept fifteen minutes ago,” he said quietly, pulling the door closed behind him.

“You what!”

“Found this,” he said, pulling a small electronic device from his breast pocket. “Don’t worry, it’s been disabled.”

Kip stared at the tiny piece of technology as hackles rose on his back.

“Sons of bitches.”

Culver shook his head.

“Nah. Amateurs, Kip. Rank fucking amateurs playing at big boys’ games. Now, come to the window. I want you to see the sort of view you miss when you work indoors all the time.”

The chief engineer followed Culver to the window and looked down on his city. It was a relatively clear morning, the first in a while. A few gray clouds scudded out near the mountains to the east, but otherwise the sky was clear, save for two army helicopters holding position over the bridges across Lake Washington. And then he saw them, a sea of color, a teeming, seething mass of humanity streaming onto the bridges and heading for the city center.

“What the hell?”

The crowd had already swept past a small army roadblock at the eastern end of the crossing and was beginning to string out in a long procession that took up every available lane.

“The wishes of the people, Kip. I didn’t think they were being heard downstairs either. So I invited them all here to have their say.”