Helen quoted on the screen, '"We are Stardust. We are golden. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."'
'My, a lady from the CIA who knows Joni Mitchell too. Some week this is.'
'It fits,' Helen said. 'So somewhere around here they have a place they've called Yasgur's Farm. And unless Bill Ruffin does his job, we've got under twelve hours to find it. You people think some more. I have to brief the President. He's on his way.'
The screen went blank. No one wanted to speak.
'The President in Vegas…' Lieberman said finally. 'It must be bad.'
Schulz fiddled with the news channels now coming back onto the monitor. 'It is.' Pictures of wrecked buildings, people in pain being rushed away on gurneys, panic, chaos.
'Is that what Charley really wanted, Mo?' Schulz asked. 'Can you believe that?'
She looked at the pictures on the screen and shook her head. 'Not the Charley I met. But I don't think that Charley is there any more. This is a different person, and like I said, once you have that closeness, people just follow. All the way.'
CHAPTER 43
The Cambridge Mandate
Tim Clarke insisted the Air Force provide him with supersonic transport to Vegas as soon as the severity of the attack became apparent. When he bawled enough, and looked as if he wouldn't stop bawling, they put him in the number two seat of an F15 and did as they were told. He was talking to people in the steaming heat of the emergency shelters set up on the city edge before Helen even knew he'd arrived. By the time she caught up with him, after an urgent, disturbing drive from Nellis through the deserted and wrecked Vegas streets, he'd left the camps of shocked, distressed people and gone to see the damage for himself.
Clarke was walking down the Strip, by the Flamingo and Caesar's, a bunch of Secret Service people following mutely in his wake, soaked in sweat, Graeme Burnley among them. Helen told the driver to stop and wait for her, then caught up with the gaggle walking behind Clarke.
Burnley stared at her when she arrived. He looked lost. 'This is one hell of a bad idea. The guy insisted on it but I'm telling you now we shouldn't be here. God knows what the radiation level is. Whether we've still got crazies in these buildings. Or what good this is doing at all when we've got bigger decisions to make. Also' — his face was red and soaked in perspiration — 'I wish to hell he'd remember that the rest of us don't fit the superman tag. You wouldn't catch me dead walking out here at this time of year, even when the weather was halfway normal. This is like marching through a furnace and it's as if he hardly notices.'
She watched Clarke tread down the middle of the deserted road, taking in the devastation on both sides. Half the Mirage was burned out, some smoke still rising from the smouldering shell. Fire crews stood back, watching the giant building from a safe distance. It looked bad. All you could hope to do in this kind of situation, she guessed, was evacuate as many people as possible. And right along the Strip, stretching away into the distance, the story seemed the same: rising smoke, damaged buildings that stood like rotten teeth against the clear blue sky, and emergency services idling away in the deserted road.
'I wouldn't worry about radiation,' she said. 'We did some tests immediately. It's flash energy. If you get it, you know about it, but five minutes later it's pretty much gone, down to a near-acceptable level. At least with this attack it is.'
'Great. That still doesn't explain why we're here. Jesus, we don't even have any film crew to get some mileage out of it.'
She just looked at him.
'Okay, okay, I'm sorry. That was an awful thing to say. And pointless too. I think the idea we can news-manage this one into some nice, comfortable place is disappearing fast.'
'I guess so,' she said, and watched Clarke ambling slowly along, taking everything in. This was the second day of his presidency. She guessed someone in that position could only move in one of two ways: get bigger or get smaller. And she didn't have any doubts about which direction Clarke intended to take.
'Helen?' the President said, turning round to look at the little group behind him.
'Sir?'
'You're okay,' he said, smiling. 'That's good. Come and walk with me. And don't worry about the traffic'
Burnley shot her a caustic glance, and she strode up to Clarke. On his call they picked up the pace and put a little extra space between them and the followers.
'Hell of a place for a private conversation,' the President said. 'Walking down the middle of the Strip at four in the afternoon.'
'If you want this to be private, sir.'
He groaned. 'Jesus. You people are so stiff it must make it hard getting up in the morning. So? What happened?'
'She turned up the controls. Focused it all somehow. We wondered what we'd get if she managed to pull everything together. Now we have the answer.'
'But what caused this?'
'We're working on the fine detail, sir. Think of it as a combination of fire, a powerful burst of radiation, and some odd electromagnetic effects too. A cocktail, if you like.'
'It looks like a bomb site, Helen.'
'And it is, of a kind. Except that some of the injuries go beyond mere blast effects.'
Clarke stared at her with that look she was coming to recognize, the one that said: Tell me now, because we don't let up until you come clean.
'It looks like we have some form of spontaneous combustion, sir. Of people. I'd like to leave it at that. For now.'
'Jesus…'
'And while I'm dealing out the bad news, I should say that this is only a foretaste of what she'll have tomorrow. When we roll up to the zenith, the energy out there will be much greater than we have at the moment. This could be just a sideshow compared with what's to come. Today she burned a track a mile or so wide down the city. What she can throw at us when the cycle peaks will probably be four, five, even ten times that magnitude.'
Treasure Island was coming up on the left. The two ships in the man-made lake outside were gutted, fire-eaten wrecks, half-sunk in the lagoon.
'And this was meant to be an instrument of deterrence?' Clarke wondered.
She shook her head. 'No one seriously suggested that, sir. Not when you go into the SDI papers in any detail. We knew what we were building all along.'
He kicked a stray Coke can with some force. 'Bull. Some people knew. But you didn't. Your predecessor didn't.'
'I guess not. I'm sorry, sir. If there's something you think I should be doing that I'm not…'
'Forget it. I'm just a grouchy old bastard sometimes. You ask anyone who was in the Gulf with me. Amazed the papers didn't pick up on that one when I became running mate. Maybe that was one way being black helped. I mean, what else did they have to say?'
'That's not fair. Or worthy of you. Sir.'
'No,' he said, dark eyes shining right into her. 'And thank you for pointing that out.'
'This meeting you've called…'
'Yeah. Thirty minutes to go. I know.'
'What's the purpose of it? We have as much work under way as we can and the lines of reporting are in place. Also I think we are starting to get somewhere. From what I hear, you have everybody in attendance. The chiefs of staff, us, the Bureau, these federal emergency people Levine keeps talking about. More people from Washington than I ever knew existed.'
He was staring at the shell of the big Treasure Island casino. 'Did a fund-raiser there last year. Boy, was that fun. Those guys never expected to see me coming back as President. Or in circumstances like this.'
'Sir. May I say something?'
'You don't sound like the kind of person who's easy to stop.'
'You have to lose the race issue. It could cloud your judgement.'