A Song Called Youth (129 page)

Witcher said, “Uh-uh. They have smoke detectors.”

“But we’re locked in here anyway. Under siege, like.”

“I was referring to even the possibility of your smoking it in the hall. You know I don’t tolerate smoking in the house with me.”

“In the bathroom? Please, Dad? When Jeanne gets out?”

“No. Take another pill if you need nicotine. Get a patch.”

“Not satisfying that way.”

She was pouting now. He liked seeing her pout. It was sexy.

He imagined taking her, then. Her and her pout. Actually, really fucking her. He almost got a hard-on thinking about it. The excitement was like a vibrating piano wire in him.

“I’m thinking about this plan, this locking ourselves in here,” Aria said. “I don’t like it. I want to go to the pool, and go jogging.”

“It’s just for a few hours, till things cool off,” Witcher told her. “They want to arrest me. It’s that simple. In a few hours things will be different. It will be a
fait accompli,
and they’ll see the error of their ways, and we’ll negotiate with them.”

“There’s just the three of us, against all their people. And that Claire woman doesn’t approve of us. How you keep us. She was here, she saw us. She acted very superior. I don’t know if she’s going to negotiate much.”

“Oh, she will.”

He wondered if he should tell them about the strategy. The purging. No. Unknowable, how they might react. They would have relatives on Earth.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Jeanne came out of the bathroom, nude except for the towel on her hair, bringing a scent of soap and scrubbed skin with her.

Witcher added, “Why don’t you go take a shower, Aria? You’ll feel better.”

She sighed. On the Colony, he made them all shower two or three times a day. Not so he could watch, but because he liked them clean in this crowding. Completely clean. She went to the bathroom, muttering in Scandinavian.

“And douche while you’re in there!” he called after her.

Thinking that he might have them play with one another, while he was waiting to see if the Colony would break down his door.

Paris, the Hôtel de Ville.

Watson felt a little better, seeing his new suite of rooms. It wasn’t a proper suite at the moment, of course, since most of the furniture had been moved against the walls to allow for the cardboard boxes the movers had left in the middle of the sitting room. They hadn’t even bothered to put the boxes marked “bedroom” in the bedroom, blast them. Frog bastards.

But God, what a beautiful room. He had developed a taste for ornate French decor lately. This one was 1890s, Belle Époque he supposed, ornate almost to a fault and yet lovingly composed, lovingly preserved. Perhaps he ought to purchase some paintings for that wall, though, it looked a little—

“Colonel Watson?”

Giessen.
Always breaking in on him. “Yes?”

The natty little German was standing in the doorway. With him were two SA guards.

“It should be obvious, Giessen, that I’m quite busy. Is it important?” He was sorry he hadn’t yet made up the video-animated “message” from Crandall informing Giessen of his new posting. Shouldn’t have put it off till the evening. But he’d been eager to get into his more spacious flat.

“It is,
ja,
quite important,” Giessen said. Adding, “Herr Watson.” Knowing it irritated Watson. “We found the boy’s body in the river this morning. Bruises on his neck. From a man’s hand. Apparently he’d been strangled, although not quite successfully, before being dropped in the Seine.”

“Indeed.” Stuart! That bloody idiot. Supposed to make it took as if the boy fell in by accident. Another cock-up.

“So I decided to have another talk with the guard who was the last one to see the boy. A Sergeant Stuart. I became convinced Stuart was lying—so we had him extracted.”

“What! No one is to use an extractor without my authorization!”

“Or Rolff’s.” Giessen smiled.

Rolff! The bastard had betrayed him. Or possibly Giessen had intimidated him into it. The bloody fool should have realized that if Watson went down, Rolff, his co-conspirator, went down with him.

“And the extractor told us some very interesting things,” Giessen said, insufferably smug. A very faint smile on his liverish lips. “That you ordered the boy killed. That you asked Stuart to do it. And the boy tried to tell Stuart something, to talk him out of it. He didn’t get out much. Enough. Something about Crandall being dead. Video animation. That would explain why Crandall always seemed to take up your case when things were not going your way . . . ”

Watson felt the warmth and comfort of the room recede from him, like an elevator failing down a shaft. “Disinformation,” he sputtered. “NR disinformation. Planted in Stuart, in the boy . . . ”

“No. We’ve had the Crandall video decrypted. They’re animations. Is he dead?”

“Certainly not. He—he wanted animations. Security reasons. Can’t reveal.”

“Oh, yes? Very improbable. I’ve spoken to the Inner Circle. You are to be detained pending an investigation. Please come along.”

Watson pointed at the guards, spoke in his most authoritative tone. “This man is attempting a coup. Drag him out of here and lock him up.”

They didn’t respond. They walked across the room, stepping around the boxes, but working their way implacably to him. Giessen had chosen men loyal to him.

The mirror-visored helmets reflected his face as they came toward him. He saw himself, doubly reflected. Shaking, angry.

Saw his own image get closer and bigger. And saw the expression on his face change as they took him by the wrists.

Change from anger to fear.

FirStep: the Space Colony.

Russ Parker blurted the whole thing as he rushed through the hatch of Claire’s office, barely clearing the low doorframe with his head as he came in. “He’s frozen the doors! He brought one of those autohacker programs with him, booted it into the door control. They’re locked but good. Permanently. Shutting off the power wouldn’t help.”

Stoner, sitting on the only other chair in the little office, was staring at the monitor that showed Witcher’s apartment door. Two Colony Security guards were there, working at it with tools. “How long will it take them to get through?”

Claire, sitting at her desk nursing a cup of cold coffee, said, “Two hours. It’s pretty well reinforced. Could take even longer, in fact. We can’t blast through—he’s too near the outer hull. Too much risk we’d rupture the Colony. Anyway, he’s got bodyguards in there. Those women—with their guns. They could hold off our people indefinitely from in there.”

The fone on Claire’s desk chimed. Witcher smiled out of the little monitor. “Hello, all,” he said. “And how are we today? One big happy family?”

Claire switched on the fone’s cam so Witcher could see her. “We’ve got the full story now, Witcher,” she said, trying to control the tone of her voice. Best not to provoke this paranoid. “We know about the S1-L and the timetable. What we don’t know is why. You want to tell me about it?”

“Is this some sort of delaying tactic till they can break through the door? They’ve got a long way to go. You can tell them to stop, though. First of all—I’m well protected here.” He gestured, and the big busty blonde stepped into the shot, brandishing an autopistol.

God, Claire thought, what an arrested adolescent this old man is. Keeping walking-talking soft-core porn foldouts around him. Barbie-on-Her-Honeymoon dolls with GI Joe accessories. Too much James Bond in his youth. Why hadn’t she realized before how sick he was? Psychopaths are clever. That’s why.

“Second,” Witcher went on, “don’t try it, because if you do, I’ll transmit the signal ahead of time, if anyone interferes with me here. I prefer to time things my way, to get all my people under cover, but if I have to . . . ” He shrugged. “And don’t think about interfering with my transmitter. I have a monitor on it for spacecraft. If any of your EVA pods come near it, I’ll know. I’ll transmit.” He clapped his hands together once. “You’ve got thirty seconds to tell them to stop.” He kept smiling, pleasant as a kiddy-show host.

Claire hesitated, then said, “Hold on.” She cut to another line, called the guards, gave the order and quickly came back to Witcher.

“It sounds as if they’ve stopped,” he said.

“They have. So now it’s not a delaying tactic, you can tell us what the fuck you think you’re doing.”

He looked at her with a little surprise. “Hanging out with those streetfighters affected your speech mannerisms. Well, yes, I’ll tell you. I was planning to tell you, a little later, anyway. I was going to warn the resistance people to take refuge just before it all went down. Minutes before.”

“Killing how many others?” she asked hoarsely.

“With luck, ninety percent of the population of the world, Claire. Across racial boundaries. Across the spectrum. The S1-L virus is not racially selective. And I’m no racist. I will, in fact, be
killing
most of the racists. I’m having the canisters placed that way. This will eliminate the Second Alliance. And that’s just the beginning. We’ll have a chance to make the world a just place to live, for the first time.”

“Yeah,” Russ muttered, “you’re real morally uplifting.”

Claire gestured at Russ for silence. She bent closer to the fone-cam. “Go on.” Thinking that if she understood his logic, maybe she could talk him out of it.

Witcher sipped a mineral water reflectively, and then said, “Why do you suppose racism arises? Why conflicts of any kind, really. It’s all instinct. Sociobiological necessity. Xenophobia coming out of territoriality responses. Ultimately, from a territory that’s overburdened by population, strain on its resources. Smoke believes much the same thing.”

“Up to a point, maybe.”

“But, you are implying, he would never advocate mass extermination for population control. Ah, now. True. It’s an ugly thing for me to do. It will create, in fact, major health problems on Earth due to all those decomposing bodies. For a while. But I’ll be up here, and most of the survivors will manage to protect themselves. The virus will die out. The bodies will be dealt with. The population of the Earth will be a tiny fraction of what it was—and suddenly, for the first time,
Utopia will be possible, Claire.
” Real fervor was coming into his voice now. “We’ve had the technology for Utopia for years—but population stresses made that technology more a disadvantage than an asset. Wipe out most of the population, and suddenly everything becomes manageable. We can let most of the planet revert to its healthy, natural state. We can afford to end pollution. We can organize a world government at last—in this situation, it would be inevitable. Think of it! One world! My company’ll be ready. My trained security people. We’ll take control. Slowly we’ll bring the population back up—but only a bit, to manageable levels. Most of the people in the world, Claire, are suffering—they are better off dead. We have to think of those who will come: they’ll live in a world without racism—I’ll outlaw even the faintest tinge of racism! A world without organized religion! I’ll outlaw that, too! A world without crime, because there’ll be abundance. A world without pollution. Without urban sprawl, or suburban blight. All those damnable housing projects.
Gone,
all of it. Look at that side of it. I’ll restructure things for
real
social justice. No more slums. An end to exploiting the Third World.”

“Christ,” Stoner said. “A liberal’s version of fascism.”

“It’s
order,
is what it is, order and peace. No armies when I’m done,” Witcher went on smoothly. “No more fighting. No wars! Not one more war!”

“Not one more
word,
” Russ interrupted. “I can’t handle one more word of this crap. This is some kind of special blasphemy against God. It’s as bad as the Second Alliance and as bad as Hitler.”

Claire nodded. Numb with disbelief. “You’ve been planning this all along, Percy?”

“No. I expected the NR would be a vehicle to overthrow the competition. Rid me of the other ones who want to unify the planet—enslaving it is their way of unifying it. I thought I’d see my chance at some point. And then one of my people made contact with Dr. Cooper, and after our London computer break-in cued me on their viral experimentation . . . Well, the S1-L has a short life. The other bioagents are too unpredictable, too long-lived. And of course, I didn’t want the racially selective one.”

Claire thought:
All
males get crazy when they get powerful enough. “You’ve got agents who’re going to release this stuff on your signal—all over the planet?”

“Not precisely,” Witcher said, glancing away.

“What it is, most of them are in two central locations, where the labs are,” Stoner said. “They’re supposed to pick up the stuff, spread out from there. Most of ’em don’t know what they’re going to release.”

Stoner was at another fone, watching the chronometer digitalizing the seconds and minutes in the corner of the screen. A text message flashed onto the screen then. Something he’d been waiting for, Claire thought, judging from his expression.

“That’s it. It’s all over.” Stoner turned to the other fone. “It’s already over with, ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ We traced your operation, busted your labs. I hipped some old acquaintances in the NSA to it. You can transmit all you want. We’ve got your people. And your viruses.”

Claire sagged with relief.

Stoner went on, “It was too fucking ludicrous to work.”

“You people . . . ” Witcher shook his head, tears in his eyes. Gaping. “You have no perspective. Well, I’m cutting the NR off. Not one penny more, not one page of intelligence more.”

“We don’t need you, it turns out,” Claire said. “We’ve found . . . another backer.”

“Have you.” His voice shrill. Breaking as he went on, “Have you now. The New Resistance was practically my creation. It should be under my guidance. And if it’s not, it’ll go completely wrong. It seems it already has! Fine. We’ll see how much credibility the NR has after tonight. Stoner, you didn’t get all the agents there were to get. There was one who
was already deployed.
Already has the canister at ready. She’ll be at the receiver in about two hours. I’m going to signal her. I’m going to tell her:
Use
it!”