Kafari’s voice interrupted his dark and suspicious train of thought.
“I feel okay, Simon,” Kafari said. “Should I be feeling sick? What’s happening, out there?”
More of the subconscious tension gripping his midsection uncoiled. “Honey, you have no idea how glad I am to hear that.” Simon willed his hands to let go their death-grip on the edge of his desk, then drew several deep, calming breaths. “And no, you shouldn’t be feeling sick. If you’d breathed that stuff, you’d have gone into convulsions and ended paralyzed within a few seconds.”
A shocked, choked sound of horror came through the commlink. “Convulsions? Paralyzed? What in the name of all that’s unholy did they turn loose?”
“I’m trying to find out. Don’t get out of the car for anyone or anything until you get an all-clear from me. The affected zone is downwind from you, so you should be all right where you are. Don’t try driving out, yet. God knows what trigger-happy police would do, watching a car emerge from that part of the city, just now. Do you have anything to eat or drink with you?”
“Uh… Let me check the emergency kit.” He heard rustling sounds, one sharpish grunt, then she said, “I’ve got a couple of bottles of water and some energy bars.”
“Good. I’d say we’re looking at maybe eight to ten hours, to get things calmed down and get some answers on what we’re dealing with, here. Ration them, if you have to, but remember dehydration’s worse than hunger.”
“Right.” Grim, down-to-business. The voice of a woman who’d seen combat and knew the score. “I’ll wait it out as long as it takes. I don’t suppose anyone knows where Vittori Santorini is?”
“Not yet,” Simon growled. “Why?”
“I’d like to give him my personal thanks for landing us in this mess.”
Simon surprised himself with a smile, fleeting but genuine. “That’s a sight I’d give a paycheck to see.”
Her chuckle reassured him. “Love you, Simon. Call me when you can.”
“Love you, too,” he said, voice rough with emotion. All to hell and gone…
He turned his attention to the disaster engulfing the rest of Jefferson. Sonny was tapping news feeds from five major cities, now, rocked by explosive protest riots. Law enforcement agencies, engulfed and overwhelmed, were screaming for help from Jefferson’s military. Reserve forces were scrambling from half a dozen military bases, rushing riot-control units to contain the damage. Simon scowled. The very presence of soldiers in the street was creating damage, serious damage, guaranteed to play right into Vittori Santorini’s grasping hands. Rioters on the receiving end of combat soldiers’ armed attention would lay blame, loudly and savagely. And there was only one logical scapegoat available to take the brunt of the blame: John Andrews.
With the election tomorrow…
Simon swore under his breath, torn between disgust and a sneaking trickle of admiration for a stunning job of planning and executing the downfall of a political regime inimical to Vittori’s plans. The man was fiendishly clever, charismatic, a natural showman — and deadlier than any scorpion hatched on old Terra. Simon had never seen any political or social movement capture hearts and minds as fast as Vittori’s Populist Order for Promoting Public Accord had, gaining speed and winning converts by the thousands every day.
How many more would join POPPA after tonight, Simon couldn’t even hazard a guess, but he was betting the final tally would run to the millions. He wondered bleakly if John Andrews truly understood the magnitude of political disaster Jefferson now faced. POPPA’s so-called party platform was a wildly jumbled hodgepodge of rabid environmentalism, unsupportable social engineering schemes with no basis in reality, and an economic policy that was, at best, a schizophrenic disaster begging the egg for a chance to wreak uncountable chaos.
Within half an hour, the magnitude of the night’s damage was brutally apparent. Smoke was rising toward the stars from dozens of arson fires blazing unchecked across downtown Madison, where firefighters — forced by circumstances to relinquish their biohazard gear to emergency medical teams — refused to go into the affected zone until more equipment could be brought in from Nineveh Base. With conflicting news reports flying wild, John Andrews called a press briefing, appearing before the stunned population with a plea for a return to calm.
“We are trying to determine the number of casualties, but the vast majority of victims are alive,” he said, visibly shaken. “Medical teams have set up emergency field hospitals in Lendan Park and the Franklin Banks residential area. Nearly a hundred doctors, triage nurses, and emergency medical technicians are moving through the area in full biohazard suits, administering counterparalytic agents and treating people with serious injuries. The paralytic agent appears to be affecting the voluntary muscle groups, which means most people should not be at risk of death. We’re still trying to determine what the agent is, so we can administer effective medical treatment. Be assured that no one in my administration or law enforcement will rest until we have found and brought to justice the person or persons responsible for this atrocity against unarmed civilians. I therefore urge you to return to your homes while professional emergency teams respond to the crisis.”
It was, Simon scowled, one of the worst speeches he had ever heard. Instead of reassuring the public with carefully considered, factual information designed to relieve fears without conjuring new ones, he had dwelt on the most disturbingly negative aspects of the crisis. He had then, with fumbling stupidity, called the whole sorry disaster an atrocity — a phrase guaranteed to further upset people — and tried to pin blame on a vague threat from unknown subversives.
It didn’t matter that he was probably right, given the evidence Simon had already gathered. Millions of people world-wide had been watching in stunned disbelief as embattled law-enforcement officials clubbed civilians to the street and gassed the crowd with riot-control chemicals. With those scenes imprinted vividly on the public consciousness, it was a very, very short step to assuming that police had also fired the paralytic agent.
By refusing to publicly admit that possibility, President Andrews had insulted the intelligence of the entire voting populace. Regardless of who had fired those cannisters, Vittori Santorini had just accomplished his primary objective — violent disruption of the social order, necessitating strong-armed measures to bring things under control.
Just before midnight, John Andrews issued orders imposing martial law on every urban center in Jefferson and announced a planet-wide curfew until order had been restored. Kafari was trapped for the duration. Simon spent a long, bitter, sleepless night, watching the unfolding dynamics of the situation. Armed soldiers with live ammo in their guns deprived the mobs of their ability to loot and destroy at will, so the rioters returned to their homes, switched on their computers, hooked themselves into the datanet, and churned out a flood of angry rhetoric, flaming everyone and everything connected to John Andrews and maligned the president’s personal habits, decisions, and political allies.
POPPA’s datasite, so inundated by people trying to access the live news footage, the recorded replays of the speech and its aftermath, and the policy statements issued by Vittori Santorini and his sister, crashed the entire datanet for nearly three hours. By dawn, word had finally begun to trickle out that President Andrews had been correct in at least one critical factor: most people would recover. Ninety-eight percent of them, in fact, were ambulatory and able to return home. The agent had — thank God — been a short-duration chemical that was already degrading into an inert, harmless substance. The only casualties were those with underlying medical conditions — asthma and heart failure being the primary causes of death — and those crushed in the stampede or fatally injured when they collapsed on stairways, while driving groundcars, or operating dangerous machinery.