With his prayer finished, Spicer looked straight at the camera and started in. The morning sun illuminated the saucer over his right shoulder.
“Judgment Day is here,” he roared into his handheld mike. “In fulfillment of biblical prophecy, the Anti-Christ is almost here. There”—he gestured grandly at the saucer behind him—“is his chariot! Do you doubt the word of God? Do you doubt the evidence of your own eyes? Repent, you sinners, and be saved. Repent, I say, and God will save us from the Anti-Christ and evildoers who accompany him…” His harangue went on and on while his producer told him via an earphone that he had the largest audience in the history of his ministry. The news gave him new strength.
With the saucer looming ominously behind him, Spicer wrestled with the Lord over the fate of the earth’s sinners, which was everybody, of course.
Ten minutes into his oration, Spicer had a larger audience than Fox, MSNBC and CBS combined. Given the news over his earphone, Spicer had to suppress his glee and keep a somber look on his sour old puss while he ranted on.
Government cops decided to run Spicer off and started making noise; the rapt crowd nearby shouted ugly things, so they backed off.
After listening a while to O’Reilly’s summary of the coming Götterdämmerung, the president got out of bed, pulled the curtains aside and peeked out the window. Yep, that damn black plate was still there. For all he knew, it might remain there until Judgment Day. Hell, the next election was only a year away; then the next president could worry about it.
“The D.C. chief of police estimates the crowd at a quarter million and growing,” P. J. O’Reilly said ominously.
“Tell them to shut down access to the city,” the president said. “Stop the trains. Put up roadblocks. Don’t let anyone else in.”
A look of surprise crossed O’Reilly’s face. Why hadn’t he thought of that? He rushed away to issue the order.
The president turned on his television and flipped through the channels with his remote. One of the news shows was now broadcasting Spicer, so the leader of the free world watched almost a minute of the divine’s tortured anguish, then surfed on. The hot women were worried, the experts in a dither, and a dingbat congresswoman from California was demanding action, although of what kind, she didn’t say.
A news ribbon streaming across the bottom of the screen on one network quoted the Russian president as saying the saucer should have come to Red Square in Moscow. Nothing the Americans agreed to with aliens would bind Russia. Paris echoed that sentiment.
Muslim clerics in the Middle East denounced the saucer news as Hollywood fakery designed to tarnish the holy image of the Prophet. Large riots were promised. Just in case it wasn’t fakery, one cleric issued a fatwa for the saucer people.
Frowning, the president flipped off the television. He wondered where Rip, Charley, Egg and Adam Solo were. Wondered what they were up to. In the depths of his devious soul, the president knew those four were somehow responsible for the saucer parked outside the building. His building. He was getting almighty peeved at those people.
He cussed a while, put on his slippers and stomped off to the bathroom.
12
Johnny Murk and Harrison Douglas got back to Connecticut eventually. The military dropped them in Duluth, and they rode Johnny Murk’s private jet to Connecticut. They were in a foul mood when they arrived. Solo and the Cantrells had made monkeys of them, not to mention nearly killing them with a near-miss flyby of the saucer.
“The government is after those bastards, and with all their assets, we’ll always get there late,” Johnny Murk said.
The FBO bar was closed and locked, so Johnny had brought a bottle of Scotch from his plane. The two were sitting alone in the lounge drinking it neat from paper cups. Heidi the masseuse was sacked out on one of the couches, dead to the world, with her magnificent breasts pointed straight at heaven. The pink sunrise through the windows was gorgeous. Neither Murk nor Douglas paid any attention to any of these attractions.
“There is just no way we can get to Solo before the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and Boy Scouts.”
Murkowsky’s cell phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket, checked to see who the caller was and immediately answered. “Yes.”
He listened for a while, asked no questions and ended the conversation with a curt, “Keep me informed.”
He stood to pocket the phone and looked around as if seeing his surroundings for the first time.
“Well?” Douglas asked.
“My Space Command spy. The saucer is in Western Australia. No doubt about it. The White House has been informed, but nothing is happening in Washington that he knows about.”
“Oh, hell, the prez probably called the Aussie PM and the diggers are on their way right now to bag ’em and tag ’em.”
Johnny Murk turned on the television in the corner of the room, and the two men stood in front of it. Of course, the picture was of the saucer suspended over the White House lawn. Then the video switched to the quarter million or more people gathered in the streets. A sea of people. After three minutes of listening to the delicious female anchor — she never mentioned the Cantrells’ saucer — talk about the rising excitement, the fact that the police had sealed off the city and the media’s demand that the president appear before their cameras to tell the world what was happening, the network began to air man-in-the-street interviews. Everyone interviewed was absolutely certain that aliens would soon arrive. They wanted to be there for this historic occasion. The excitement and anticipation were palpable.
The two pharma moguls looked at each other.
They turned back to the television, which now aired a moment of Jim Bob Spicer praying for salvation for all the earth’s people.
“It’s like they’re waiting for the Second Coming,” Johnny Murk murmured.
“It’s a ten-ring circus,” Douglas proclaimed.
“Bet you that no one in the White House has bothered to tell State to call the Aussies.”
They looked at each other again. Simultaneously they both said, “What are we waiting for?”
Galvanized into action, each man grabbed his cell phone. Douglas called his friends in Philadelphia and promised big money; Murk chartered a Boeing 747–400 to fly a crowd across the Pacific. The plane was huge, carried a zillion gallons of fuel, and with a light load could fly the world’s biggest pond nonstop. The moguls even called their homes and told the maids to pack suitcases with clean underwear and a change of clothes and have the chauffeurs bring them to the airport. Both men’s wives were asleep. Neither man left a message for his spouse.
Heidi the masseuse continued to sleep, her magnificent trophy chest rising and falling in a gentle rhythm.
The White House was in full crisis mode. Aides ran hither and yon, telephones rang continuously, e-mails flooded the computers, and teletypes spewed out important messages from prime ministers and ambassadors and foreign heads of state. Politicians of every stripe, in offices large and small and out of offices large and small, demanded to be heard. Meanwhile, huddled behind locked doors, the president’s hard-core advisers weighed how the crisis would affect the president’s polls and his ability to get his agenda, such as it was, through Congress.
P. J. O’Reilly was in his element. He loved the hubbub. He made decisions, stroked the people he thought important, ignored everyone else, and generally behaved like the petty tyrant he was. More importantly, he refused everyone access to the president. He had the press secretary tell the press that the president was working on the saucer crisis. Discussing the situation with experts. Meditating. Preparing himself in case he would soon have to meet and negotiate with “aliens from outer space” as ambassador for all the world’s people. All six billion of them, including the French.