“They used it against soldiers first,” Flora said, remembering Yossel’s narrow escape again. “And we drop bombs on civilians all over the CSA. It’s just that… Who would have expected people to be weapons instead of using weapons?”
“Well, the genie’s out of the bottle now,” Taft said grimly. “Nobody in the world is safe from here on out. Nobody, do you hear me? There isn’t a king or a president or a prime minister somebody doesn’t hate. A man comes up to you in a reception line. Maybe you didn’t appoint him postmaster. Maybe he just hears voices in his head. You reach out to shake his hand. Next thing you know, you’re both dead, and a dozen people around you, too. How do you stop something like that?”
Flora only shrugged helplessly. For thousands of years, war had been based on the notion that you wanted to hurt the other side without getting hurt yourself. Now the rules had shifted under everybody’s feet. How could you stop someone who embraced death instead of fleeing it?
Fresh dread filled her when she thought about how useful a weapon like this might be. Surely the United States could find men willing to die for their country. If you sent them after Jake Featherston and you got him, weren’t you doing more to win the war than you would by smashing a division or two of ordinary soldiers?
But the Confederates would have targets of their own. I might even be one, Flora thought, and ice walked up her back again. Like it or not, it was true. Nobody in the USA had spoken out more ferociously than she had about what the Confederate States and the Freedom Party were doing to their Negroes.
“How many more of these bombs will we see in the next week? In the next month? In the next year?” Taft asked. “We’ve never known anything like this before. Never. That Canadian who kept blowing up American soldiers after the last war, the one who tried to blow up General Custer-he finally blew himself up, but he didn’t want to. If he’d been like these Mormons, he could have gone to a rally and done even worse.” He suddenly laughed, which made Flora stare.
“What could possibly be funny about this?” she demanded.
“I’d like to see Featherston’s face when he hears about it,” Robert Taft answered. “He knows how many people… mm, don’t love him, shall we say? He’s the one who’ll really have reason to be shaking in his boots. Sic semper tyrannis, by God-thus always to tyrants, if your Latin’s rusty.”
It was; Flora hadn’t even thought about those classes in close to forty years. At the time, she hadn’t thought they were good for anything; it wasn’t as if she were likely to train for the Catholic priesthood! Looking back, though, they’d probably improved her English. And, looking back, that had probably been the point. It sure hadn’t occurred to her then.
What Taft said made a certain amount of sense. What he said often did. People who had or should have had bad consciences would worry more about men-or women-with bombs than others would. And yet… “The Mormons are using them against us,” she said bleakly.
“Yes, but the Mormons are a pack of crazy fanatics,” Taft said. But that wouldn’t do, and he realized it wouldn’t. “I see what you’re saying. I wish I didn’t. To them, we look like the tyrants.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Flora agreed. “A lot of it’s like beauty-it’s in the eye of the beholder.”
“God help us,” Taft said.
“Omayn,” Flora said, “or amen, if you’d rather.”
“That doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” Taft said. Flora believed him; whatever else he was, he was no anti-Semite. He sadly shook his head. “What are we going to do?”
“I can’t begin to tell you, and I wish I could,” Flora answered. “We might have a better chance now if we’d done something different a lifetime ago, but it’s a little late to worry about that now.”
“Yes-just a little,” Taft said. “We have this pack of people who hate us right there in the middle of the country, and the most we can hope for, as far as I can see, is that they do us as little harm as we can manage.” Taft absently wiped his high forehead with the heel of his hand, and left a red streak on his skin.
“This has gone on for too long,” Flora said. “If we don’t settle it once and for all during the war, we have to try afterwards.” That sounded good, but what did it mean? She listened to her own words with the same sick horror Taft had known before her. What could settling it once and for all during the war mean but killing all the Mormons? If the United States did that, they wouldn’t have to worry about it afterwards-except when the country looked at itself in a mirror. Flora shuddered. All the carnage around her hadn’t nauseated her the way that thought did. “Dear God in heaven,” she whispered. “There’s a little bit of Jake Featherston in me, too.”
“A little bit of that bastard’s in every one of us,” Taft said. “The point of the exercise is not to let him out.”
“Well, Senator, we’ve found one more thing we agree on.” Flora held out her bloodstained hand. Taft clasped it in his.
XIV
The telephone on Clarence Potter’s desk rang. He picked it up. “Potter here,” he said crisply.
“Hello, Potter there,” Jake Featherston rasped in his ear. “I need you to be Potter here, fast as you can, so get your ass on over right now.”
“On my way, sir.” Potter hung up. He grabbed his hat, closed and locked the office door behind him, and went upstairs to get a motorcar. From the War Department to the Gray House on Shockoe Hill shouldn’t have taken more than five minutes. In fact, it took more like fifteen. The U.S. air raid the night before had cratered several streets on the most direct routes.
“Sorry, sir,” the driver kept saying as he had to double back. Potter suspected the President would make him sorry, too, but he didn’t take it out on the luckless young soldier behind the wheel. When he arrived, he hopped out of the Birmingham, showed his ID to the guards at the entrance to the battered Confederate Presidential residence, and was escorted below ground to the enormous bomb shelter in which Jake Featherston operated these days.
New York City had skyscrapers. Potter wondered how long it would be before men built twenty, thirty, even fifty stories underground to keep from getting blown up when bombers came overhead. He laughed. That wouldn’t work in New Orleans, where the cemeteries were on top of the ground because of the high water table. Such details and anomalies aside, the picture seemed scarily probable.
Saul Goldman sat in the waiting room. Potter nodded to the director of communications. “Am I after you in line?” he asked.
“I don’t think so, General,” Goldman answered. “I think we go in together.”
“Do we?” Potter kept his voice as neutral as he could. Goldman was good at making propaganda, but the Intelligence officer didn’t want to be part of any propaganda, no matter how good. He’d had that argument with the President before. He hadn’t completely lost it, which only went to show how good his case was.
Featherston’s secretary stuck her head into the room. “Come with me, gentlemen.” Goldman caught Potter’s eye and nodded. Sure enough, they were an entry, like 3 and 3A at the racetrack.
When Potter came into the President’s sanctum, Featherston fixed him with a fishy stare and barked, “Took you long enough. What did you do-walk?”
“Sorry, sir. Bomb damage.” Potter had been braced for worse.
And Featherston let him off the hook after that, which also surprised him. “We need to get down to brass tacks,” the President said. “You’ve both heard about these people bombs up in the USA-Mormons strapping on explosives and blowing themselves to hell and gone as soon as they can take a raft of damnyankees with ’em?”