MINUS 033 AND COUNTING
The red second hand on his watch made two circles. Another two. Another two. “RICHARDS!”
He raised the bullhorn to his lips. “SEVENTY-NINE MINUTES, McCONE.”
Play it right up to the end. The only way to play it. Right up to the moment McCone gave the order to fire at will. It would be quick. And it didn’t really seem to matter a whole hell of a lot.
After a long grudging, eternal pause: “WE NEED MORE TIME. AT LEAST THREE HOURS. THERE ISN’T AN L/G-A OR A DELTA ON THIS FIELD. ONE WILL HAVE TO BE FLOWN IN.”
She had done it. O, amazing grace. The woman had looked into the abyss and then walked out across it. No net. No way back. Amazing.
Of course they didn’t believe her. It was their business not to believe anyone about anything. Right now they would be hustling her to a private room in one of the terminals, half a dozen of McCone’s picked interrogators waiting. And when they got her there, the litany would begin. Of course you’re upset, Mrs. Williams, but just for the record… would you mind going through this once more… we’re puzzled by one small thing here… are you sure that wasn’t the other way around… how do you know… why… then what did he say…
So the correct move was to buy time. Fob Richards off with one excuse and then another. There’s a fueling problem, we need more time. No crew is on the jetport grounds, we need more time. There’s a flying saucer over Runway Zero-Seven, we need more time. And we haven’t broken her yet. Haven’t quite gotten her to admit that your high explosive consists of an alligator handbag stuffed with assorted Kleenex and change and cosmetics and credit cards. We need more time.
We can’t take a chance on killing you yet. We need more time.
“RICHARDS?”
“LISTEN TO ME,” he megaphoned back. “YOU HAVE SEVENTY-FIVE MINUTES. THEN IT ALL GOES UP.”
No reply.
Spectators had begun to creep back in spite of Armageddon’s shadow. Their eyes were wide and wet and sexual. A number of portable spotlights had been requisitioned and focused on the little car, bathing it in a depthless glow and emphasizing the shattered windshield.
Richards tried to imagine the little room where they would be holding her, probing her for the truth, and could not. The press would be excluded, of course. McCone’s men would be trying to scare the tits off her and undoubtedly would be succeeding. But how far would they dare go with a woman who did not belong to the ghetto society of the poor where people had no faces? Drugs. There were drugs, Richards knew, drugs that McCone could command immediately, drugs that could make a Yaqui Indian babble out his entire life story like a babe in arms. Drugs that would make a priest rattle off penitents’ confessions like a stenographer’s recording machine.
A little violence? The modified electric move-alongs that had worked so well in the Seattle riots of 2005? Or only the steady battering of their questions?
The thoughts served no purpose, but he could not shut them out or turn them off. Beyond the terminals there was the unmistakable whine of a Lockheed carrier being warmed up. His bird. The sound of it came in rising and falling cycles. When it cut off suddenly, he knew the fueling had begun. Twenty minutes if they were hurrying. Richards did not think they would be hurrying. Well, well, well. Here we are. All the cards on the table but one. McCone? McCone, are you peeking yet? Have you sliced into her mind yet? Shadows lengthened across the field and everybody waited.
MINUS 032 AND COUNTING
Richards discovered that the old cliche was a lie. Time did not stand still. In some ways it would have been better if it had. Then there at least would have been an end to hope.
Twice the amplified voice informed Richards that he was lying. He told them if it was so, they had better open up. Five minutes later a new amplified voice told him that the Lockheed’s flaps were frozen and that fueling would have to begin with another plane. Richards told them that was fine. As long as the plane was ready to go by the original deadline.
The minutes crept by. Twenty-six left, twenty-five, twenty-two, twenty (she hasn’t broken yet, my God, maybe), eighteen, fifteen (the plane’s engines again, rising to a strident howl as the ground crews went through fuel-system and preflight checks), ten minutes, then eight.
“RICHARDS?”
“HERE.”
“WE HAVE SIMPLY GOT TO HAVE MORE TIME. THE BIRD’s FLAPS ARE FROZEN SOLID. WE'RE GOING TO IRRIGATE THE VANES WITH LIQUID HYDROGEN BUT WE SIMPLY HAVE TO HAVE TIME.”
“YOU HAVE IT. SEVEN MINUTES. THEN I AM GOING TO PROCEED TO THE AIRFIELD USING THE SERVICE RAMP. I WILL BE DRIVING WITH ONE HAND ON THE WHEEL AND ONE HAND ON THE IMPLODER RING. ALL GATES WILL BE OPENED. AND REMEMBER THAT I’ll BE GETTING CLOSER TO THOSE FUEL TANKS ALL THE TIME.”
“YOU DON’T SEEM TO REALIZE THAT WE-”
“I'M THROUGH TALKING, FELLOWS. SIX MINUTES.”
The second hand made its orderly, regular turns. Three minutes left, two, one. They would be going for broke in the little room he could not imagine. He tried to call Amelia’s image up in his mind and failed. It was already blurring into other faces. One composite face composed of Stacey and Bradley and Elton and Virginia Parrakis and the boy with the dog. All he could remember was that she was soft and pretty in the uninspired way that so many women can be thanks to Max Factor and Revlon and the plastic surgeons who tuck and tie and smooth out and unbend. Soft. Soft. But hard in some deep place. Where did you go hard, WASP woman? Are you hard enough? Or are you blowing the game right now?
He felt something warm running down his chin and discovered he had bitten his lips through, not once but several times.
He wiped his mouth absently, leaving a tear drop-shaped smear of blood on his sleeve, and dropped the car into gear. It rose obediently, lifters grumbling.
“RICHARDS! IF YOU MOVE THAT CAR, WE’ll SHOOT! THE GIRL TALKED! WE KNOW!”
No one fired a shot.
In a way, it was almost anticlimactic.
MINUS 031 AND COUNTING
The service ramp described a rising arc around the glassine, futuristic Northern States Terminal. The way was lined with police holding everything from Mace-B and tear gas to heavy armor-piercing weaponry. Their faces were flat, dull, uniform. Richards drove slowly, sitting up straight now, and they looked at him with vacant, bovine awe. In much the same way, Richards thought, that cows must look at a farmer who had gone mad and lies kicking and sun-fishing and screaming on the barn floor.
The gate to the service area (CAUTION-EMPLOYEES ONLY-NO SMOKING-UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS KEEP OUT) had been swung open, and Richards drove sedately through, passing ranks of high-octane tanker trucks and small private planes pulled up on their chocks. Beyond them was a taxiway, wide oil-blackened cement with expansion joints. Here his bird was waiting, a huge white jumbo jet with a dozen turbine engines softly grumbling. Beyond, runways stretched straight and clean into the gathering twilight, seeming to approach a meeting point on the horizon. The bird’s roll-up stairway was just being put into place by four men wearing coveralls. To Richards, it looked like the stairs leading to a scaffold.
And, as if to complete the image, the executioner stepped neatly out of the shadows that the plane’s huge belly threw. Evan McCone.
Richards looked at him with the curiosity of a man seeing a celebrity for the first time-no matter how many times you see his picture in the movie 3-D’s you can’t believe his reality until he appears in the flesh-and then the reality takes on a curious tone of hallucination, as if entity had no right to exist separate from image.