“The forehead, mostly, but occasionally on the wrist. You can’t see it most of the time, although they say that ones with it can always see it on others who have it. You could see it in the meadow, though. Real slick and professional, like a purplish tatto, only printed on.”
“Makes sense,” the Bishop responded. “Now, will you go in and show old Pip whatever it is Greg wants you to? I want to talk to him alone for a minute.”
She looked disappointedly at Greg, but he nodded and she complied. When she was in the back room and the door was shut, the Bishop took him over to the patio doors and then out onto the patio itself. “Sit down, my boy.”
He took a chair, and waited for the old man to begin.
“You know, I’ve been thinking about who should go on this little mission, considering what has to be done. I overheard you talk of caves under the island and it’s changed the whole nature of the game, I think.”
“Oh? How?” As of now, they had been going with a small sailboat handled by but three men. Two would assist in assembling the bomb and arming it, but would then get away in a small dinghy if they could for pickup at sea. He was, however, already thinking along new and more somber lines as was the Bishop.
“I’ve always been frightened of the bomb,” said the Lord Bishop, “and I’ve even been involved in disarmament rallies. It kept me popular at Oxford and made my peers in the church think I wasn’t all Tory. But this thing, this bomb, has to be right and it has to be effective. It’s not going to vaporize the island any more than even Hiroshima, devastated as it was, was vaporized, particularly not when placed at the bottom of a cliff.”
“We already knew that. Lord Frawley and I were just discussing how to get the bomb and man up top.”
“All right—but just how effective will it be, I wonder? What of these caves and lower levels? It’ll sear and huff and puff on the surface, but what about below? Will it kill SAINT when SAINT is so well insulated? Will those in the tunnels, with their great powers, be able to ride it out and then survive?”
“Well, the best place would be right in the common, and that’s out of the question,” Greg told him. “The second best would be over at the meadow, and I think that’s no more likely. I think, though, that Lord Frawley is considering planting it in another cave that enters the Institute at that level. Most of the blast will still be surface, but enough will go up that tube that it should blow the Institute from the bottom up. Nothing is certain. We don’t have the kind of bomb that will do it in, period, although such bombs exist. We haven’t the means to steal it, we haven’t time to build it, and nobody with one is going to give it to us. I would think an A-bomb about a third the size of what did in the Japanese should be enough.”
“But is it, really? If we explode something as terrible as an atomic bomb and then the computer and Angelique somehow emerge after-well, it would do their job nicely and fulfill the prophecy.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Two teams. One for the bomb, another for the Institute. An attack launched, let’s say, no more than an hour before our bomb goes off. Blow up what we can, kill whoever we can, God forgive me, get as far as we can. In particular, blow the suites, the library, whatever and wherever key people are likely to be. They’re expecting something. Let’s give it to them.”
“A diversion?”
“Yes, indeed. That, and more. Real damage, as far and as far down as we can get.”
“But Security—”
“—Will be preoccupied and harried during that period. This is a chance to act boldly, audaciously, decisively—as they do. To give them a taste of their own medicine and their own fears. Who knows who we might get strictly at random? Sir Reginald? The Dark Man?”
“Angelique,” said Greg hollowly.
“What can I say except that we will save her immortal soul by doing so? Don’t fear death quite so much, my friend. Angelique didn’t, which is why the Dark Man found something far more terrible. Greater love has no man but to lay down his life for his friend. Even greater, I think, for strangers. Is living in the fascistic Orwellian world they will create for the West better than death or is it merely a slower, more miserable, more prolonged death horror? Knowing that their inevitable goal is a massive nuclear exchange with the East? Even the most conservative of governments and the most paranoid do not want nuclear war today even as they build bigger and better weapons. They want it, and if you want it and gain control you shall have it.”
“It could backfire and tip our hand to no profit,” he said. “We might not get anybody important or insure anything, but alert them. They’ll put everything on hold and scour the island.”
“Pip is rigging a dead man switch for the triggering mechanism. If it sounds as if anyone is even coming close ahead of the deadline it will be triggered, and if they shoot him, as is most likely no matter what powers we talk about, he releases the switch and it blows. No, his period of danger is between set-up and detonation time.”
“You’re talking like you expect to be there.”
He sighed. “My boy, I have always expected to be there. I am seventy-two, but I climbed a mountain in Wales as late as last year. My heart and mind are sound and I’m in excellent shape. Now Pip, of course, will be the trigger man for the bomb.”
“Now wait a minute!”
“No, no, hear me out! He knows what he’s doing. He’s an expert and he’s designed this thing. There’s none else nearly as qualified. What you don’t know is that he’s got a cancer. A bad one, in the brain and inoperable, with a good deal of it running around his body and settling elsewhere. He is in constant pain, and had methodically prepared for his own suicide before it grew so bad and he so weak that he’d be in bed. He doesn’t believe in God or the afterlife, but he does believe in miracles and this is his. His whole life he’s sent young men and women out to die, or ordered the deaths of others. His whole life has been spent in the dark corners. He never married, and he lives only for that, but it was taken away several years ago in a scandal involving some of his superiors as well as a strong and unrealistic idealistic streak on the part of the last Labour government. The very existence of the bomb we’re using is an act of treason, since it’s one of many that he and several colleagues saved and hid with RAF connivance when the stages of Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament policy were announced by the Prime Minister. That’s how he got it.”
MacDonald was stunned. “I—I didn’t know.”
“You see, it’s his one last act, his one spectacular way out. He’ll save the world, and, more important, he’ll do it personally, not sit back and order others to do so.”
“But we’re talking about a climb up a sheer rock face of almost four hundred and fifty meters! He can’t possibly make it!”
“He’ll make it because he wants to more than he wants anything else in the world.”
“But—you! You were just telling me how healthy you were!’’
“I am indeed. For me it is a different thing. I might live another ten or twenty mostly useless years watching everything fall apart. I might go tomorrow, of course—only God knows that for sure. But, my boy, I have spent my entire life in the service of God and His holy Church. I have fought a lifelong, devoted war in His name—and I’ve been losing. All my life I’ve wondered, after every failure, every setback, why God called me to this profession. I’ve felt like Job. Call it madness if you wish, or conceit, but I feel that all of that was preparation for this. I am called to do battle with Satan himself. No greater glory could a man of my faith ask. More, I’m the only one that understands them as they really are, and, as a result, I’m the only one who can fight them on spiritual grounds. No one, but no one, will deny me this. If I am forbidden to go, I will get a boat and sail right into Port Kathleen myself. I know—I’m sounding less like a doddering old fool and more like a fanatic.”