Clarke thought about the queue of astronauts inside NASA waiting for the opportunity to dance around this deadly, poisoned ball of plastic and metal in the sky. 'It has to go. Even if we haven't figured out what to do with it. We have to cover every option.'
In two hours he would be going on live TV to announce the emergency measures: the suspension of all civil aviation flights and public ground transportation, the closure of all nonessential government buildings, and orders barring the opening of all but vital private sector offices in the major cities. All of these measures would run from noon indefinitely, although the idea in the broadcast was to emphasize that, if everything 'went according to plan', the restrictions would be lifted by late the following day. And most other heads of state were following the same line. Trying to balance caution with the need, the overriding need, to avoid an outbreak of panic.
'Dammit,' he said, 'I wish we could shut down the markets. And the Net too. We can keep a handle on the newspeople here. Make them act responsibly. But it's useless if someone can just turn on a PC, go to that damn Web site, and read it all for themselves. Plus all the other rubbish out there.'
Dave Barnside, hidden away in a corner at the back of the cabin, said, 'We've looked at it, Mr President, and it's just not possible. There's no practical way of pulling the wire on that thing. It's designed to be impregnable.'
'So are the markets,' Fogerty added softly. 'Who knows? Maybe she'll take them both down for us.'
'I don't think so, not the Net anyway, that's where these people live,' Clarke said, watching the lights on the ground move slowly beneath them. At night, the land was so anonymous. The Children could be anywhere. Even far beneath the helicopter, listening to the distant swirling of its rotor blades, running the show through some control installation hidden in the woods, all down some humble little piece of copper and maybe a dial-up connection with AT&T. 'From now on we run this from the Pentagon bunker. I want the White House cut down to essential staff. Move my family out, Graeme, take them somewhere secure. Until this thing is through, we stay in the Pentagon. I want no unnecessary air travel, no one out of the bunker unless they need to go.'
'Sir.'
'Don?' Millington, a brigadier general from the Army seconded to the National Security Council, nodded. 'Make damn sure they don't touch that last dome. Make that your top priority.'
'Absolutely, Mr President,' Millington replied, the braid on his uniform glittering in the darkness. 'We got clearance from the Spanish to join the air cover and they've agreed to a temporary exclusion zone now. No one gets in or out of there without our knowledge.'
Clarke looked at Barnside. 'Can they do what they did in Kyoto?'
The Agency man shook his head. 'We believe that's impossible, Mr President. We have the Spanish site wrapped up. In Kyoto they put some kind of infrared locator on the dome to get there. That sort of weapon's no use in mountains of the kind we're talking about here, even if they could get close enough, and they can't. Also, there's definitely no locator on the Spanish dome. We've fine-combed every last inch of it, and the surroundings.'
'Where the hell,' the President asked angrily, 'did they get that VX shit from anyway?'
Jenkins sighed. 'If you know chemistry, can get a line inside a fair-sized chemicals company, and have enough money to set up a small lab, it's not that difficult, sir. We've had people making Sarin in one room and LSD in the other. You can pick up the recipes like that off the Net.'
'Jesus…'
'I advise,' said Millington, 'that we put our air bases on alert for when we do track down these people. If we get a location at home, we can take them out very rapidly, shut this whole thing down.'
'Yeah?'
The cabin went quiet. They were descending. And there was something new inside Clarke's voice that gave them all pause for thought, something close to bitterness.
'You guys,' the President went on, 'you kill me sometimes. That really is all you want. A neat little name and address. And then off you go, sending in your people and your airplanes, bombs a-bombing, guns blazing — I got the details of that stuff in San Francisco, by the way, Barnside. Real clever. Are you thinking out of your dicks or something? You know something? I'm the dumb-assed moron you people used to send on these jobs. And I never asked why. Not once. I was as plain stupid as those suckers you got out in the field right now.'
Clarke could feel the heat in his face and he didn't mind who saw it. If they thought this outburst was unworthy of the President, he didn't care. This wasn't a time for niceties.
'It's a question of maximum response, Mr President,' Barnside replied. 'How else do you deal with these people?'
'Bullshit. You guys haven't got your head around what's going on here yet. None of you. Forget 'dealing with these people' for a moment and get back to the matter at hand. And that, unless I'm mistaken, is getting us all through the next few days as much in one piece as possible.'
'Sir,' Millington said, 'if we cauterize the source —'
'Aw, Jesus. Cauterize? Don't give me that crap. I know what you guys want. A carte blanche so you can walk out of here and do what the hell you like. Well, you aren't getting it. Understand? Sure, maybe the world is that simple. All you do is find these people, bomb the hell out of them, take out their dome, and we all go back to the way we were. But let me ask you this: What happens if we do that, then find out they have got some way of taking out the Spanish dome? What happens if we do that and discover they've locked that goddamn thing in the sky in some way that all your computer geniuses combined can't pry it open? What if they just turn out to be a lot smarter than we thought? Consider that. They know we can blow them to pieces if we track them down. Do you think they care? Of course not. If they did, they wouldn't be in this position in the first place.'
The cabin was silent. Dan Fogerty looked out the window and saw the illuminated shape of the White House far off in the distance.
'They've already thought this through,' Clarke said softly. 'Taking them out won't make any difference to what's going to happen. May be just what they want, for all we know.'
'So, Mr President,' Fogerty asked, smiling as he broke the silence, 'what do you want us to do?'
"Think a little. Find these people. Take them alive. Hand the keys to their installation back to Sundog, just in case they need them. And save your testosterone for your girlfriends. That too much to ask?'
Fogerty could see the dry grass of the White House lawn swirling under the downdraught of the helicopter blades, the line of cars waiting to greet them, rush them back to their various scattered offices throughout the area.
'Sir,' he said, and listened to the low murmur of confused approbation that followed.
CHAPTER 26
Probability
Geri Southern stood behind the counter of the blackjack table in the Bird of Paradise Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. She watched the distant Mirage volcano spit fire for what seemed the ninety-ninth time that night and wondered whether the short-cut croupier's uniform and the nasty fishnet tights just might leave permanent crease marks on her body. The tall, thin tourist on the other side of the table gave her a half-hearted grin. She stared back, with as artificial a smile as she could muster, and said, 'You want to play? Or you just here to look?'
This graveyard shift was not one she liked. All the drunks. All the losers, eking out their last remaining dollars. And then there was this emergency thing that got big-time on the news. It was all so complicated. The President dead and some black guy there in his place. Phone systems, television networks closing down. Like it was the end of the world. No one could decide whether this would be good for Vegas or bad. The airport was closing in a couple of hours, but most people seemed happy to book in a few more nights in the hotel, party some more, see how it all panned out. This was Vegas. Why worry?