Greta’s long face went bleak. “Oh, to hell with Washington! They never do anything useful. They can’t protect us here. I’m sick of them and their double-talk.”
“Wait a minute!” Oscar said, wounded. “I’m from Washington. I’ve been useful.”
“Well, you’re the one exception.” She rubbed her skinned wrists angrily. “After what happened to me today, I know what I’m up against. I don’t have any more illusions. We can’t trust anyone but ourselves. Kevin and I are going to seize the airlocks and seal this entire facility. Oscar, I want you to resign. You’d better resign before the people in Washington fire you.” She began jabbing her spidery fingers at him. “No, before they arrest you. Or indict you. Or im-peach you. Or kidnap you. Or just plain kill you.”
He gazed at her in alarm. She was losing it. The skin of her cheeks and forehead had the taut look of a freshly peeled onion. “Greta, let’s go for a little walk in the fresh air, shall we? You’re overwrought. We need to discuss our situation sensibly.”
“No more talking. I’m through being played for a sucker. I won’t be gassed and handcuffed again, unless they come in here with tanks.”
“Darling, nobody uses ‘tanks.’ Tanks are very twentieth century. The authorities don’t have to use violent armed force. The world is past that phase as a civilization. If they want to pry us out of here, they’ll just …’
Oscar fell silent suddenly. He hadn’t really considered the op-tions from the point of view of the authorities. The options for the authorities didn’t seem very promising. Greta Penninger — and her allies — had just seized an armored biological laboratory. The place was blast-resistant and riddled with underground catacombs. There were hundreds of highly photogenic rare species inside, forming a combination mobile food source and corps of potential hostages. The facility had its own water supply, its own power supply, even its own atmosphere. Financial threats and embargoes were meaning-less, because the financial systems had already been ruined by netwar viruses.
The place was sewn up tight. Greta’s pocket revolutionaries had seized the means of information. They had commandeered the means of production. They had a loyal and aroused populace in a state of profound distrust for the outside world. They had conquered a mighty fortress.
Greta returned her attention to Kevin. “When can we junk these lousy prole phones and get our regular system back?”
Kevin was all helpfulness. “Well, I’ll have to make sure it’s fully secure first… How many programmers can you give me?”
“I’ll run a personnel search for telecom talent. Can you find me my own office here in the police station? I may be spending a lot of time in here.”
Kevin grinned gamely. “Hey, you’re the boss, Dr. Penninger!”
“I need some time off,” Oscar realized. “Maybe a nice long nap. It’s really been a trying day.” They cordially ignored him. They were busy with their own agenda. He left the police station.
As he tottered through the darkened gardens toward the looming bulk of the Hot Zone, weariness overcame him with an evil metabolic rush. His day’s experiences suddenly struck him as being totally in-sane. He’d been abducted, gassed, bombed; he’d traveled hundreds of miles in cheerless, battered vehicles; he’d concluded an unsavory alliance with a powerful gang of social outcasts; he’d been libeled, accused of embezzlement and criminal flight across state bound-aries… He’d arrested a group of police; he’d talked an armed fugitive into surrendering… And now his sometime lover and his dangerously unbalanced security director were uniting to plot behind his back.
It was bad. Impossibly bad. But it still wasn’t the worst. Because tomorrow was yet another day. Tomorrow, he would have to launch into a massive public-relations offensive that would somehow justify his actions.
He realized suddenly that he wasn’t going to make it. It was overwhelming. It was just too much. He’d reached a condition of psychic overload. He was black, blue, and green with wounds and bruises; he was hungry, tired, overstressed, and traumatized; his ner-vous system was singing with stale adrenaline. Yet in his heart of hearts, he felt good about the day’s events.
He’d outdone himself.
True, he’d suffered the elemental blunder of being kidnapped. But after that, he had handled every situation, every developing crisis, with astonishing aplomb and unbroken success. Every move had been the proper move at the proper moment, every option had been an inspired choice. It was just that there were too many of them. He was like an ice-skater performing an endless series of triple axels. Some-thing was going to snap.
He felt a sudden need for shelter. Physical shelter. Locked doors, and a long silence.
Returning to the hotel was out of the question. There would be people there, questions, trouble. The Hot Zone, then.
He trudged to a Hot Zone airlock, now manned by a pair of elderly nomad sergeants, up on the night shift. The camou-clad gran-nies were amusing themselves, doing cat’s-cradle string-games with homemade yoyos of chemically soaked sponge. Oscar walked by the women with a ragged salute, and entered the empty halls of the Hot Zone.
He searched for a place to hide. An obscure equipment closet would be ideal. There was just one more little matter, before he re-laxed and came fully apart at the seams. He needed to have his laptop. That was a deeply comforting thought to Oscar: retreating into a locked closet with a laptop to hold. It was an instinctive reaction to unbearable crisis; it was something he had been doing since the age of six.
He had left a spare laptop in Greta’s lab. He crept into the place. The former Strike headquarters, once sterile and pristine, bore the scars of political backroom maneuvers — it was filthy now, full of scat-tered papers, half-eaten food, memos, bottles, junk. The whole room stank of panic. Oscar found his laptop, half buried below a stack of tapes and catalogs. He pulled it out, tucked it under his arm. Thank God.
His phone rang. He answered it by reflex. “Yes?”
“Am I lucky! Got the Soap Salesman first try! How’s it goin’, Soapy? Everything under control?”
It was Green Huey. Oscar’s heart skipped a beat as he snapped to full attention. “Yes, thank you, Governor.”
How on earth was Huey inside the lab’s phones? Kevin had as-sured him that their encryption was uncrackable.
“I hope you don’t mind a late cold-call, mon ami.”
Oscar sat slowly on the laboratory floor, bracing his back on a metal cabinet. “By no means, Your Excellency. We live to serve.”
“That’s mighty good of you, Soapy! Lemme tell you where I am right now. I’m riding in a goddamn helicopter above the Sabine River, and I’m lookin’ at a goddamn air strike.”
“You don’t say, sir.”
“I DO SAY!” Huey screamed. “Those sons of bitches blew my people away! Black helicopters with missiles and automatic weapons, murdering American civilians on the ground! It was a goddamn mas-sacre!”
“Were there many casualties, Governor? I mean, besides that un-fortunate French submarine?”
“HELL YES there were casualties!” Huey screeched. “How could there not be casualties? Woods on both sides of the river were crawlin’ with Regulators. Total operational dysfunction! Too many spooks spoil the broth! A total screwup! Goddammit, I never ordered those pencilnecks to dump you and the Genius Girl inside some god-damn fake ambulance!”
“No, Your Excellency?”
“Hell no! They were supposed to wait patiently and catch you when you were sneaking out of the lab together on a hot date. In that context, an abduction woulda made sense. The problem with nomads is mighty poor impulse control. Not what I wanted, boy, not on my agenda! I just had something that I needed to show ya, that’s all. Right now, you and me and the ladylove coulda been puttin’ our feet up, with parasols in our drinks. We’re supposed to be havin’ a scientific summit over here, we’re supposed to be ironing out all our difficul-ties.”