8

Celine had been half right. Nick Lopez’s staff on the World Protection Federation did not know where he was, but they could certainly exchange messages. Celine’s request for an “urgent and highly sensitive” meeting had been forwarded to Nick as soon as it came in. Normally he would have answered at once, but for the moment something more urgent was on his mind.

What was happening to the aircraft?

He was on his way from Washington to a private meeting with Gordy Rolfe, and all their previous sessions had taken place either at the World Protection Federation offices in New Rio or at The Flaunt, the corporate headquarters of the Argos Group. The steel-and-glass splinter of The Flaunt towered four thousand feet above the Palladian architecture of Houston, and Gordy’s summit suite overlooked the rebuilt city. Nick had assumed that they would use the same rendezvous site today. That would give him a comfortable and productive flight of at least an hour and a half, during which he could attend to other business. But his craft was beginning its descent less than twenty minutes after takeoff.

He glanced at the telltales and saw that all mechanical and electronic conditions were normal. The weather was clear and fine. Still the vehicle went on descending. He checked the Automatic Vehicle Control. The AVC’s destination coordinates had been provided from Gordy Rolfe’s office, and Nick had never thought to question them. But instead of the glitter of The Flaunt ahead there was only a peaceful landscape of rural Virginia.

The craft went into a gentle bank, and as it leveled off Nick caught sight of a runway. The black strip was short, and it was narrow, but from the way that the vehicle was behaving, a full electronic landing system was in operation.

Nick could see no sign of any other aircraft. He waited through the gentle touchdown and taxi to the end of the runway. Then he slid open the hatch and allowed the glide stair to carry him from plane to ground.

He found himself standing in a shallow valley, with low grassy hills to the east and more substantial wooded mountains to the west. A solitary building hugged the ground two hundred yards past the end of the runway. Beside it rose strange shapes, red and green and yellow, oddly angular and complex in the late afternoon light. He began to walk toward them.

At the moment when he recognized both the building and its neighboring structures — it was an old school-house, its playground still filled with brightly painted seesaws and monkey bars — a figure emerged from the schoolhouse door.

Gordy Rolfe was easy to identify. He was diminutive, with a head too big for the slender body. A great sculptured upsweep of snow-white hair exaggerated the disproportion. It was styled for effect, as were the big steel-rimmed glasses. A black jumpsuit, Rolfe’s standard attire, emphasized rather than disguised the crooked back and uneven shoulders.

Rolfe did not walk toward Nick. He waited, leaning against the schoolhouse wall. When the two were within earshot, he said, “Don’t judge this place by appearances, Senator. I learned to read and write in there.”

“I guessed as much.” Lopez peered in through one of the windows. “Been a while since the school was used, though.”

“You knew where we were going to meet?”

“Not until we landed. I thought I was headed for Houston. But I’ve seen pictures of this place before. I was Senate Majority Leader in Washington when the headquarters of the Legion of Argos was raided and the Eye of God was taken prisoner. The old headquarters is directly beneath us, isn’t it? We had pictures of the whole attack plastered all over the place.”

“So did we.” Rolfe grimaced, increasing his likeness to a sinister elf. “Of course, the Legion members had a rather different view of events.”

Nick Lopez nodded. He was round-faced and brown-complexioned, and the hair above his broad brow was set in a high, old-fashioned pompadour. Despite Rolfe’s extravagant coiffure, Lopez towered a foot and a half above the other man. “Did you know her well?”

“Pearl Lazenby — the Eye of God?” The gray eyes behind their big lenses glittered, and Gordy laughed harshly. “Fucking right I knew her. From the time I was six until I was seventeen she was more important than my own parents. Of course, for a lot of that time she was serving a sentence in judicial sleep. But there was morning-noon-and-night talk of her, and I was raised with her rules.”

Raised by the members of the Legion of Argos, Nick thought, with their rigid attitudes. Lots of prayer, lots of dogma, lots of discipline and harsh punishment. But no medical treatment to make Gordy Rolfe of normal height, even though that had been a standard procedure long before the supernova. No simple corrective changes to his vision, to make those anachronistic eyeglasses unnecessary. No protocol to adjust the spinal curvature that threw the right shoulder a little lower than the left. It was no wonder that the head of the Argos Group now had his own rigidity and strangeness.

Nick said only, “I’m surprised that you can stand to come back here, with all those memories.”

“Stand to come here?” Gordy Rolfe twisted his head to look sideways up at Nick, even though Lopez had stooped slightly to see in through the classroom window. “Senator, you’re so-o wrong.” He moved into the schoolroom, gesturing to Lopez to follow. “When the Eye of God was recaptured and taken away to be put back into judicial sleep, my mother and father and the other Legion members wailed and moaned and acted like it was the end of the world. Me, I did the same — in public. But in private I danced. Pearl Lazenby scared me shitless. When I heard that she had died after three more months in judicial sleep it was the happiest day of my life.”

“Were you still here then, with the Legion?”

“Yeah. But it was already starting to fall apart. See, the Eye had prophesied that she’d wake up at a time of great disaster and lead the Legion members to take over the whole world. The supernova happened, and they hauled her out of judicial sleep. The prophecy was validated. Everyone said, this is it. They were primed and ready to go. Pearl assured them that the great victory of the Legion of Argos was only days away. Then the boys from Washington came in here and grabbed her, and suddenly the holy cleansing was over before it started.”

“Not just the boys. Did you know that Tanaka led them here?”

Gordy Rolfe stood in front of a bank of three old elevators, ready to enter the middle one. He swung around sharply at Lopez’s question. “President Tanaka? I thought she was off on the Mars expedition when the gamma pulse hit. That’s what her bio said when she ran for President.”

“She was. She got back just in time to help Special Forces capture Pearl Lazenby.”

“Then I owe her one. Hell, if I’d known that, I might have voted for her. Anyway, when Pearl was taken away, nobody in the Legion could believe it. Her prophesy had been wrong, see, and when she prophesied as the Eye of God she was supposed to be infallible. Some of the old-timers tried to weasel round that, but the newer members weren’t buying. People started leaving.”

“Not you, though.” Lopez followed Rolfe into the elevator.

“No.” Gordy Rolfe pressed the bottom button, which bore an icon like a flaming torch, and they began to descend. “Once she was out of the way, why leave? There were opportunities for a genius at headquarters.”

“A genius like you?”

“Who else? I knew I had talent. And I didn’t know a damn thing about the world outside. I stayed behind, looked at what the Legion was ready to walk away from, and started work. That was the beginning of the Argos Group. Houston is the official headquarters, but I prefer this. I come here more and more often.”