The officer frowned “This place, sir?”
“Spent my young life in motel rooms… ‘n’ not always sleepin’ neither. You git all the security you need. Call in patrol ‘copters… just so’s you’re sure they’re ours this time! Register mc and Herman in rooms down at the end of the court, but we’ll actually stay up here close to the coffee shop. That oughta fox any sonuvabitch who knows where we are and wants to call in an air strike.”
George hurried away. Outram beckoned Mulder over to a booth in the comer and allowed both Lessing and one of the Secret Service men to check for bugs. They found none, and the President gestured everyone except Mulder out of earshot.
The rich fragrance of American coffee — unavailable in India — filled the overheated room. Odors of snow-wet clothing and, after a while, of hamburgers, French fries, eggs, and bacon followed. Silverware clattered above the buzz of voices. An hour passed, and the waning sun turned the frost patterns on the windows into yellow sapphire and orange topaz. The cut-out paper Santas pasted on the panes became bloodstained ogres, and the wilted, little Christmas tree by thecash register blazed with ruddy light, like Moses’ burning bush.
This year Santa was splashed with gore, and the burning bush was not a sign from a caring God but rather a harbinger of His Last Terrible Trump.
Come to Judgment, folks! It’s Armageddon Day!
A heavy-set Secret Service man stamped in, all snow and steaming breath, to tell Outram that the media-hounds had tracked him down. Three carloads of TV people and journalists waited outside.
Outram scowled. “Let the fuckers freeze! Tell ‘em no comment tonight.” Then he relented. “Aw, hell, get me’n Herman out the back way and into our cabins. After we’re gone you can let the bastards in to warm up. This weather’d ice the balls on a snowman!”
It was an hour before the two cabins were readied and checked. Lessing, Morgan, and Wrench were quartered in the cabin adjacent to Mulder’s, where they set up their own sentry-watches. Mulder seemed to trust Outram, but Lessing refused to take chances.
In the cold, eery moonlight, with the snow blanketing a world of pastel blues, greys, and relentless black, Lessing leaned against the jamb, just inside their cabin’s single door. Nothing moved outside; only the stiff, anguished figure of a Secret Service man was visible in the snow by Outram’s window. God, the man must be cold! The price of serving the mighty.
A snuffle in the darkness told him Wrench was up. He heard the slithery sounds of clothing being donned and shoes slipped on; then the little man was beside him.
“Matter?” Lessing grunted. “Got to pee?”
“Can’t sleep. Anything?”
“No.”
Wrench noted the Secret Service man and made clucking noises. “Jesus, they’ll have to thaw that guy out with a blowtorch!”
“Be glad Mulder didn’t have us stand guard out there.”
“Screw that! Devotion has its limits.” Lessing sniffed. “How’s Morgan?”
“Sleeping the sleep of the innocent. He’s an up-and-comer, a fairhaired boy who never expected to double as batman for General Washington at Valley Forge!”
“Double as what!”
“Batman… aide-de-camp, valet. You know. British army term, dear boy.”
Lessing changed from one numbed foot to the other. A question had been bothering him all day, and he asked it: “What’s Outram want? Why call Mulder all the way from Ponape?” Wrench would know if anybody did; Lessing had seen him talking with the President’s staff.
“Outram can’t hold it together. He needs Mulder… the Party.”
“For God’s sake, why? He’s President. He has the Army, the Marines… the police.”
“Washington’s gone, New York’s gone, Chicago’s a mortuary. Things’re falling apart fast. The military wants to push the wagon. So do some governors and some mayors and a lot of other guys. Outram knows he can’t handle them alone. He can’t use the traditional controls either; they’d have things ‘back to normal’ before you could say ‘lox ‘n’ bagels.’ He thinks the Party has potential.”
“Your Party’s too small. What can it do?”
“A lot. Outram’s calling in favors from every so-called ‘rightist’ faction in the country. He has to gel his act together before the big-city liberals of the Establishment… what’s left of ‘em… get theirs going again. He needs support, but the political Right is split up into personalities, parties, and sects… all fucked up, with their pants down as usual!”
“And?”
“That’s where the Party of Humankind comes in. Outram knows Mulder, and he knows our Party is the best organized, best funded, and best trained of all the ‘right wing’ shit-kickers. We’re also international, we know business, and we have credibility in the Third World. In the United Stales we’re strongest in rural areas, the towns, and the smaller cities… the very places where the most people, the real American majority, live. They’re the ones who’ve survived Starak fairly intact. A lot of those folks believe what we believe, but they couldn’t say it… not with the lobbies and the pressure groups and the media all ready to whomp ’em for being ‘racists’ if they open their mouths. Rural support is historically right for the Party, too. The National Socialist Party in Germany had a heavy ‘farm’ streak: agrarian radicals, the dignity of labor, farm boys with scythes, sturdy Aryan youths with pitchforks standing beside plump, blonde Frauleins mit braids und der big boobies, ja?”
Lessing chuckled. “I’ve seen the posters. Not my type.”
“Anyhow, the great American majority is pretty pissed. Ready to stand up at last and kick some butt on its own. It always has been, down through history. Nobody, but nobody, can bushwhack our ethnos and not get a lot bigger whack in return! Outram can use us, all right! He probably guesses we’ve got plans for later, but he can’t be choosy now.”
“What’s next?”
“Christ, ask Mulder! All I got was that in the morning orders’ll go out to our American cadres to start bangin’ the drum. Hang out the signs, sing, dance, and peddle snake-oil like crazy!”
“Get out the vote while the opposition’s still unzipped?”
“Yeah. Like that.”
Lessing asked, “And Mulder? What does he want? What the hell is he all about, anyway?”
“He wants a better-run world, one where his ethnos… his people, his Volk, his nation… can shine again and be free.”
“That’s fine for a press release. Now tell me the rest.”
Wrench’s eyes glittered powder-blue in the moonlight. “Straight?”
“Yeah.”
The little man blew out his cheeks. “What makes him tick, way down deep? I don’ t know. Maybe he wants his honor back, the honor of his grandfather and the others who died for the Third Reich.”
“After nearly a hundred years? Come on!”
“No, for real. They… the SS… a lot of other Germans… did what was right for their country. For a communist-free Europe. For the Aryan race. For the future of the world.”
“That was a century ago. Who cares now? Nobody! Mulder’s as flaky as a mere I once knew who wanted to restore the Roman Empire!”
“You want to know who cares? Who really cares? The guys who continue to use their so-called ‘Holocaust’ to pry bucks out of us ‘guilty’ suckers! The ones who peddle a grossly falsified version of the history of the last century or so and try to have anyone who disagrees with them locked up. They care very much.”
“They say its you who distort history.”
“So why don’t they face us… examine our evidence, debate, talk… act like real historians instead of thought-police? Why shut us out of the media, pass laws against our speaking, persecute us, sue us, and vilify us? This is what lights Mulder’s fire: a matter of justice and a fair shake. You can’t even debate a different point of view any more, much less present it as an ‘option’ in a school or university. History is what they say it is. Mulder’s ancestors hold top billing as the original, A-l, prime-time, world-class villains, creatures of Satan, murderers. Fiends, monsters, and sadists. Say different and you ‘re an ‘anti-Semite,’ a ‘Nazi,’ apsychopath. You’re evil. You lose all credibility, maybe your job, maybe your life.”