61

After three days of interrogation by the FBI and agents from the National Security Agency, as well as six hours of intense grilling by the Secretary of the Navy, Senator Gilmonn had been set free from his office and apartment in Long Beach, California. He had ordered his chauffeur to drive east.

Nobody had been able, or particularly willing, to hang anything on him, though the trail of the arrow or monkey or whatever from the U.S.S. Saratoga to his car was reasonably well defined. Given more than a mere two and a half months of investigation and second-guessing, he might have been in some trouble, and the captain of the Saratoga relieved of his command, but things had changed markedly now in these United States. It was a different nation, a different government — functioning to all intents and purposes without a head. The President, under impeachment, was still in office but with most of his strings of influence and therefore power severed.

Gilmonn’s incarceration, which might have been pro forma half a year ago, was now simply out of the question.

For all that, what had they accomplished? They had killed Lieutenant Colonel Rogers and perhaps thirty Forgers who had refused to vacate the desert around the bogey. They had blown the bogey into scattered pieces. Yet few involved in the conspiracy believed, now, that they had done anything to even postpone, much less remove, the sentence of death placed on the Earth.

He stood on the sand near the gravel road that passed within two miles of the site of the disintegrated bogey, binoculars hanging on a leather strap from his neck, face streaming with sweat under the brim of his hat. The white limousine that he had hired with his own money waited a few yards away, the chauffeur impassive behind his dark glasses and blue-black uniform.

Army and government trucks passed along the road every few minutes, some bearing radiation stickers; many of those outward bound, he knew, carried fragments of the bogey. He was not privy to what they were finding. Basically, his presence was tolerated, but now that the conspiracy had accomplished what virtually everybody wanted, those directly involved, while not charged, were being shunned. Scapegoats might be too strong a word…and it might not be.

Gilmonn unabashedly cursed Crockerman for having forced them all into an untenable and illegal no-man’s-land of circumventions and conspiracies.

And still, deep in the Earth, what some — mostly geologists — had called “the freight trains” and others “bullets” rumbled toward their rendezvous. They could not be traced anymore, but few doubted they were there. The end might be a matter of days or weeks away.

Gilmonn entered the limousine’s rear door and poured himself a Scotch and soda from the dispenser. “Tony,” he said, slowly twirling the glass between the ringers of his right hand, “where do you want to be when it happens?”

The chauffeur did not hesitate. “In bed,” he said. “Screwing my brains out, sir.”

They had talked a great deal during the drive from Long Beach. Tony had been married only six months. Gilmonn thought of Madeline, his wife for twenty-three years, and while he wanted to be with her, he did not think they would be screwing their brains out. They would have their kids together, and their two grandchildren, perhaps in the ranch house in Arizona. A huge family gathering. The whole clan hadn’t been together in five or six years.

“All that, and we didn’t accomplish a Goddamned thing, Tony,” he said with a sudden deep flood of bitterness. For the first time since the death of his son, he felt like cursing God. “We don’t know that for sure, Senator.” “I do,” Gilmonn said. “If any man has a right to know he’s failed, I do.”

HOSTIAS ET PRECES TIBI, LAUDIS OFFERIMUS

62

During his last hours, Trevor Hicks sat at his computer skimming and organizing genetic records sent from Mormon sources in Salt Lake City. He was staying at the home of an aerospace contractor named Jenkins, working in a broad living room with uncurtained windows overlooking Seattle and the bay. The work was not exciting but it was useful, and he felt at peace, whatever might happen. Despite his reputation for equanimity, Trevor Hicks had never been a particularly peaceful, self-possessed fellow. Bearing and presentation, by English tradition, masked his true self, which he had always visualized as frozen — with extra memory and peripheral accomplishments — somewhere around twenty-two years of age, enthusiastic, impressionable, quick-hearted.

He rolled his chair back from the table and greeted Mrs. Jenkins — Abigail — as she came through the front door, carrying two plastic bags full of groceries. Abigail was not possessed. All she knew was that her husband and Trevor were involved in something important, and secret. They had been working straight through the day and night, with very little sleep, and she brought in supplies to keep them reasonably comfortable and well fed.

She was not a bad cook.

They ate dinner at seven — steaks, salad, and a fine bottle of chianti. At seven-thirty, Jenkins and Hicks were back at work.

Being at peace, Hicks thought, worried him somewhat…He did not trust such flat, smooth emotions. He preferred a little undercurrent of turbulence; it kept him sharp.

The alarm went through Trevor Hicks’s brain like a hot steel lance. He glanced at his watch — the battery had run down without his noticing, but it was late — and dropped the disk he had been examining. He pushed the chair back and stood before the living room window. Behind him, Jenkins looked up from a stack of requisition forms for medical supplies, surprised at Hicks’s behavior. “What’s up?”

“You don’t feel it?” Hicks asked, pulling on a rope to open the curtains.

“Feel what?”

“There’s something wrong. I’m hearing from…”He tried to place the source of the alarm, but it was no longer on the network. “I think it was Shanghai.”

Jenkins stood up from the couch and called for his wife. “Is it starting?” he asked Hicks.

“Oh, Lord, I don’t know,” Hicks shouted, feeling another lance. The network was being damaged, links were being severed — that was all he could tell.

The window afforded a fine nighttime view of the myriad lights of downtown Seattle from Queen Anne Hill. The sky was overcast, but there had been no reports of thunderstorms. Still…The cloud deck was illuminated by brilliant flashes from above. One, two … a long pause, and by the time Mrs. Jenkins was in the living room, a third milky pulse of light.

Mrs. Jenkins looked on Hicks with some alarm. “It’s just lightning, isn’t it, Jenks?” she asked her husband.

“It’s not lightning,” Hicks said. The network was sending contradictory pulses of information. If a Boss was on-line, Hicks could not pick its voice out through the welter.

Then, clear and compelling, the messages came through to Hicks and Jenkins simultaneously.

Your site and the vessel in the sound are under attack.

“Attack?” Jenkins asked out loud. “Are they starting it now?”

“Shanghai Harbor was an ark site,” Hicks said, his voice full of wonder. “It’s been cut from the network. Nobody can reach Shanghai.”

“What…What…” Jenkins was not used to thinking about these things, whatever his value to the network as a local organizer and procurer.

“I believe—”

His own inner thoughts, not the Boss’s, said before the words could come out, They’re defending us but they can’t stop everything from getting through. They’ve never told us this before, but they must have put ships or platforms or something in orbits to watch over the Earth—