Mo got up from the table, walked behind his back, put a soft hand on his shoulder, so close he could feel the warmth of her breath. Davis shuffled his chair around, watched the drama begin. It sounded like a video game through the tinny speaker of the little phone. There was no hint of the vast mountain of energy that sat beneath these three, distant human beings. Then the Shuttle began to move, the camera following it, rising into the blue Florida sky, incandescent white beneath the power of the sun.
'Fly, damn you, fly,' Lieberman whispered.
And it did. For some period of time none of them could assess, the white shape rose in the sky, discarding the booster, rolling on course, pushing in a quickening vertical drive, getting smaller, heading for orbit. Heading for the game.
The screen went black for a moment, then Schulz was back, grinning with a wide-eyed ferocity. 'You got that?'
Lieberman nodded, and felt the way Mo was hugging him.
'We're moving, Michael,' Schulz said. 'We can win this.'
'Yeah,' Lieberman said, and wondered how stupid his own grin looked.
CHAPTER 36
Flying West
Clear desert, in every direction. Helen Wagner watched the empty plains roll beneath her and wondered why she couldn't close her eyes and get some rest. Barnside was sleeping thirty minutes after they left Washington, Levine not long behind him, right after he pulled together the briefing, made one last, uneasy conference call to the President. She watched them recline in the comfortable seats of the Agency jet, mouths half-open, and envied this effortless switch they had on their lives. There were just the three of them on the plane. Levine said both the HRT squad and the Delta Force team would be on the ground at McCarran a good hour before the three of them got there. Sitting on the asphalt, staring mutely at each other, waiting for someone to win the day, she guessed. There would be no changing Clarke's mind on the idea that HRT would be the ones to try to cast a nice, gentle net over the Children, of that she had no doubt. But that didn't stop someone in the military from making one last bid for glory.
Tired of watching the ground slip past, she went to the back of the plane, sat in the communications centre, keyed in her password, browsed through the pile of messages there. She clicked on the one from Schulz marked urgent, and got the news about Lieberman.
'Thank God for that,' she muttered, then shifted the rest of the E-mails into the pending tray and called back to Langley. Stuart Price took the call. He looked flustered.
'So what's the problem?'
Price blushed. 'Too much data or too little. It's the same old story with imaging. If you make the capture criteria too narrow, you get no hits. If you widen it just a little, in this case we're picking up everything from people's circular swimming pools to drainage tanks.'
'Can't you refine it in some way?'
'How? A circular object near a building? Plenty of those. A circular object away from a building? That's more promising. We're trying that. We've got some two hundred or so potential leads but before I even let you close to them I want to see them checked against what we know of them from public records. Most are turning out to be existing licensed structures.'
'Understood.'
'And in the meantime I've drafted in a team of trained photo analysis people from the Pentagon. Just to look at the pictures with a human eye. Still beats any damn computer I know of, and the more minds we have working on this thing, the merrier.'
Price went quiet, glanced off screen.
'Stuart?'
'I really ought to get back to this.'
'Say what you want to say. Please.'
'The point is… I have to be honest, Helen. We read the newspapers. We watch TV. I know how bad this situation is, and it worries me to think you're relying on us to pull something out of the coals. If you have something else that can narrow this down, then we might be able to get somewhere. Without it, we're just looking for that proverbial needle in a haystack. Give me a couple of weeks and that would be fine.'
'We don't have a couple of weeks.'
'I know. Let me put it another way. I'm real glad the Shuttle thing's going well. I think we should focus our hopes on that'
A good man, she thought. Working his heart out. 'We are. They still have to track Sundog down, and the damn thing was purpose-designed to make that hard to do. It's got some small position-adjustment power systems of its own, so it's not even that easy to come up with a particularly accurate ballpark estimate based on last known position. So you see, we can't rely on that alone.'
'I hear you. I just want you to be realistic about what we can achieve here.'
'I am. One last question and then we're done. How's the network holding up? How confident are we it can withstand this storm?'
'Search me. The MIS guys are going around the place clucking like hens, but that's nothing new. There's lots of bad shit going on out there right now in the public networks. But that doesn't affect us so much. Remember your history. They built ArpaNet to withstand a nuclear attack. I guess they have ways of keeping us running through this, even if we get some glitches along the way.'
'I hope so. I'll leave you to it now,' she said, smiled, and cut the line.
She looked at her watch. Another ninety minutes or more to go. They were late. But in any event, it hardly mattered. It looked as if they would be waiting on the ground, watching the sun set over Nevada, with nothing to occupy their time unless the Bureau had come up with some lead on their own.
She opened up the private information channel Langley had set up for the operation. Lieberman's last report was almost six hours old. She keyed the button for La Finca and Schulz came on the line. 'Hi,' she said. 'I heard the good news about Michael.'
'Yeah,' Schulz replied, half-grinning. 'Nice to have some breaks anyway.'
'So when do we get to see a new report from him?'
Schulz shrugged. 'Ask him yourself.'
The picture changed. Lieberman came on the screen. He looked whacked. The wound on his scalp bristled with stitches. 'Whoa. It's the slave driver from Langley. Do you ever give up?'
'No,' she said, looking somewhat amazed by the question.
'I'll remember that.'
'How's Sara?'
'I called when I got back here. She's okay. Iron constitution, she needed it when she married me. She's worried, of course. About everything but herself. So what's new?'
'Good. And you look… alive. Does it hurt?'
'You're too kind. Not that much.'
'The Shuttle's going to work, Michael, I just know that. But we still need to cover all the options. So when do we get that cycle report?'
He made a face. 'Ten minutes. Half an hour.'
'Great forecasting there. Mind giving me a little peek?'
He sighed. There was a pleasant relentlessness inside this woman you couldn't resist. 'You mean as far as the natural stuff is concerned? Dry and bad and nasty. Everything I thought was going to happen and some more. Heavy radiation, electromagnetic disruption. Massive UV values. You're going to be handing out some warning on general things like skin cancer and such?'
She nodded. 'They're going out already.'
'Sorry. I haven't had a lot of time to keep up with the news. Well, you tell people to stay indoors and catch the show when it comes out on video a few years hence. This thing is lighting up for the big one tomorrow.'
'What time? When will it peak?'
'Read my figures when I've done them. What I said initially still holds. I guess around 1210. Which is about as close to the solstice as you can get. It's still fluid, fluid enough to make Charley want to wait before pressing the final button, I imagine. But I think it's pretty certain that people on the Prime Meridian running from a little north of the equator up to maybe the tip of Scotland will get the brunt of it. Then it will start to die, only slowly, so you can expect a big wash of radiation and whatever else is inside that thing sweeping right across the northern hemisphere. We won't be anywhere close to normal until around 2400 or so. Which means it will affect everything from the Prime Meridian west right into the Pacific in some way or another. That's the real battleground Charley's got for tomorrow: London to Tokyo, and every place in between. And please, don't ask me what happens when she turns the magnifying glass on. What they got on Air Force One. What you got in Langley. All that at industrial strength, plus a little more I wouldn't care to guess at.'