Arc Light (81 page)

“But how the hell are we going to implement something like this?” the President asked.

“Temporary national ID cards for everyone over age eighteen. They'll identify the citizen as either a worker—and give their place and hours of employment—or unemployed. If employed, they are subject to arrest if authorities determine them to be absentees.”

“How will you know who is employed, and who isn't?” Lambert asked.

“We'll have citizens boards conduct interviews, with interviewees under penalties of perjury. We'll also computer-match using Social Security numbers against W-2s, and we'll have employers submit lists of absentees under criminal penalties. Most people, however, are honest and will comply with the order.”

“Let me get this straight,” the President's Chief of Staff, Sol Rosen, said. “You want the President to draft every working American, people who have fled their homes with their families in fear of nuclear war, and force them back to their jobs? And if they don't comply it will be desertion during time of war under the Code of Uniform Military Justice?”

“Well,” the Secretary said, squirming in his chair, “most of those people are still working on their jobs, and it won't have any effect whatsoever on them. And if they have a good excuse—illness, death in the family, that sort of thing—then they're okay. All we're talking about really even if they're picked up is that they'll be returned to work. The way you put it, it sounds like we'd be shooting them on sight or something.”

“I'm just putting it the way the press is going to put it,” Rosen said.

“I've got to tell you, Mr. President,” the Labor Secretary said, “if something isn't done, and soon, the pipe is going to run dry, and those stocks that our people count on are going to start dropping. Do you realize that from the time a 120-mm tank shell rolls off the factory line in the U.S. to the time it's ready to fire in a tank gun is four days! Four days! We fly the damn things over every night. Now, that's a credit to our phenomenal supply systems, but what I'm saying is: we may have the best transportation network in military history, but if the private sector can't provide the products, we might as well just paint
BANG
on a flag to pop out of the gun barrel.”

“The press is going to tee off on this one, Paul,” Rosen warned.

“They've done it before, and they'll do it again,” Costanzo replied.

“Yeah, but this time you're talking about something that really affects people. National ID cards? Jesus Christ, what's next—national police?”

“Is this even constitutional?” Lambert asked.

“My legal staff tells me no,” the Secretary of Labor said. “But they also tell me that the Supreme Court knows the score. They'll slow-play this one all the way up from the district court. We won't get a ruling until after the war.”

“All right,” the President said. “I've made my mind up.” He pulled out his pen. “Where do I sign?”

“Thank you for meeting with us this morning, Mrs . . ..” the old lady looked down through her reading glasses at her paper, “ . . . Chandler.”

“They told me that I needed an ID card to get food,” Melissa said, fuming over being rejected at the mess hall for lunch and then forced to wait, unfed, for three hours in line for the interview. Matthew squirmed and cried out, and Melissa shifted him from one sore shoulder to the other, glaring at the five-person citizens board in front of her.

“You do realize why you're here, don't you?” the old man to the old woman's left asked.

“To get an ID card so that I can eat,” Melissa replied, wondering incredulously at why none of the five “citizens” seemed to be under eighty years old.

“It's so that we can determine whether you're an ‘absentee,' ” a third octogenarian said.

“Now we're going to ask you some questions,” the first old lady said, “and you do understand, of course, that you are under oath.”

Melissa just stared at the woman, who waited unsuccessfully for a reply. She cleared her throat and asked to see a driver's license and credit card. Melissa handed them over, and a clerk began to type.

“Now, Mrs. Chandler, are you currently employed.”

“Yes.”

The old lady looked at the man in the middle. “You are telling us that you do have a job?” he asked.

“Yes. What part of my answer lost you?”

The man nodded. “What kind of work do you do?”

“I'm a lawyer.”

“A lawyer,” he repeated.

Melissa stared back at him. She was about ready to explode, but felt she was doing a fairly good job of controlling herself.

“What kind of law do you practice, dear?” the old lady asked, unperturbed. “Wills, divorces, things like that?”

“Mergers and acquisitions.”

“O-o-oh!” she said, smiling at her colleagues.

“Would you give me my fucking card?” Melissa snapped. “I'm starving!”

“Now we'll have none of your profanity, young lady,” a previously silent man chastised.

“Give me my card,” Melissa said, enunciating each word.

“You, missy, are an ‘absentee,' ” the man in the very center said, filling out a form that sat in front of him.

“I, Grampsy, am on maternity leave.”

He chuckled, staring back at her over the page that he held up in the air in front of him. “All leaves are canceled, Mrs. Chandler. All vacations, all sabbaticals, all leaves of absence of any kind whatsoever other than acute illness.”

She stared back at him, incredulous. “So you're drafting me?” she shouted.

“We're not drafting you,” the man said, “the President is.”

“And you think I'm going to trundle on back to L.A. with my newborn son and wait around to be blown to smithereens?”

“In some families only the workers have been going back into the city, and they're joining their families for the weekend,” the first old lady supplied helpfully, obviously a policy she felt more comfortable suggesting. “Is there a Mr. Chandler, dear?”

“He's in Europe, fighting the war.”

“O-o-oh,” she said.

“Being that as it may,” the old man in the center said, “you've got a job, and so we've got to report you as ‘employed.' ”

“I quit.”

“What?”

“I don't have a job, because I quit. Right now. I'll sign whatever papers you want. There! Are you happy now? I'm unemployed, now where's my unemployment check?”

“It doesn't work that way,” the man said. “There's no quitting after June eleventh. If you were employed on June eleventh, you're employed today. Now I remind you, you're under oath. Were you employed on June eleventh?”

“Look, you might as well throw me in the draft-dodging jail or line me up in a ditch and machine-gun me or whatever it is you do with people who are incorrigibly addicted to life, because I am not going back into that city—no way, no how.”

“It's not up to us, Mrs. Chandler,” the man said. “It's a matter for the police.”

“Come on! Look, do you think my job is vital to national security? How many mergers and acquisitions do you think are going on right now in L.A.? And I have a six-week-old baby to take care of.”

“We could give her a dispensation,” the old lady said, almost whispering the last word.

“Gloria!” the man next to her snapped.

“What's a dispensation?” Melissa asked. “I want it. Give me a dispensation.”

The man was trapped between the stares from Melissa and Gloria, and he looked from one to the other and then at the rest of the board, finding no easy out. “Oh, all right!” he growled. “But you have to keep this under your hat, you understand me, missy? We're gonna give you a dispensation for hardship on account of your baby, but don't you go blabbin' this all around ‘cause we can jerk it just as quick as we can grant it, you understand?”

“Yes, sir”

The typewriter clattered for a few seconds, and then they presented her with her ID. “Okay, young lady, you're officially in the U.S. Army on special
unpaid
leave with the rank of private. Now go get yourself some chow.”

Lambert swung the door, but just before it closed, it banged into his secretary. “Why don't you just kick me in the teeth next time?”

“What now?” Lambert said, waving his hand across the papers spread all over the office, covering every square inch of his desk, chairs, and sofa in neat little piles. Yellow tabs were stuck onto each pile with one- and two-word descriptions of what lay underneath. “I've got about two weeks' worth of reading to do today.”

“You've got a visitor,” she said, her voice rising on the last word as if he would be cheered by the interruption.

“I intentionally cleared my calendar to catch up on these reports. Now, I don't care who's out there, just blow him off.” She stared back at him unmoving. “Well, what would you have me
not
read?” He picked up the pile of papers nearest him on the rumpled blanket under which he had slept every night since they had gone aboveground. “Maybe this: ‘Russian Anti-Satellite Threat to Manned Shuttle Flight'? Or this,” he said, bouncing the thick report off the sofa to point at the one next to it, “ ‘Risk of Radioactive Contamination of Ogalala Aquifer from Disaster Area Run-Off'?”

“You know, you really need to work on your people skills if you want to grow up to be President.” She held the door and lightly swung it against her nose, her face only half visible behind it.

“Who is it?” Lambert asked, frustrated.

“Nancy Livingston.”

“President Livingston's daughter?”

“The one and only,” the secretary said before disappearing, not bothering to wait for him to respond.

When the young woman came in, Lambert almost didn't recognize her. Her hair, normally shorn short on one side, was growing out and she wore jeans and a T-shirt instead of the floor-length skirt and black leather jacket.

“Miss Livingston,” Lambert said, shaking her hand and making room for her to sit in a chair. He walked around behind his desk and sat. “What can I do for you?”

Looking at her as she sat slumped in the chair, he felt like her grandfather.

“I wanted to ask you for a favor,” she said, with no hint of either animosity or friendship in her voice. “You know, I've read about you in the magazines and newspapers and all, and you seem like you're an okay guy. And I'm sorry about your wife and all.”

Lambert nodded at her. She sat up, her shoulders still hunched over and her hands squeezed between her knees. “It's just Mom and Dad.” She looked up. “They went home to New York, you know, to their apartment.” Lambert nodded but realized, feeling guilty for it, that he had not known what had happened to President Livingston and the First Lady. Nancy looked down again. “Well, it's just, well, they, like, dismissed the Secret Service people after the Russians threatened to nuke us again, and decided that they'd just stay in Manhattan, you know.”

Lambert nodded.

“And I was just wondering”—she was on thinner ice now, and uncomfortable—“well, Dad is always saying how much . . . well, I mean, he thinks you're a good guy. A good, you know, whatever it is you do. He thinks you're good at it, and, well, he likes you. They both do.”

“You want me to call your dad and see if I can talk him into leaving the City?”

She shrugged, looking at the ceiling and opening her mouth to speak but just dropping into a huff, her shoulders caving in about her again. “I don't think they'd leave with just a phone call,” she mumbled.

“You want me to go up to New York?”

She looked up, hopeful.

“You know, of course, that we're trying to keep people from leaving their homes,” Lambert said, thinking of the spin the press would put on it if they caught wind of the story.
“National Security Adviser Quietly Advises Former President to Evacuate,”
he imagined the headline to read.

“Nobody's paying any attention to that. I mean, get real. Everybody's seen those pictures from the war sites.” She smirked. She was in her early twenties, but she looked younger just then. “You're from
New York, aren't you?” she asked, and Lambert nodded. “The article said your dad is, like, some big stockbroker or something?”

“Investment banker.”

“Are your parents still in Manhattan?”

Lambert shook his head. They had talked to him about the situation after Razov's ultimatum, and they had left for Maine where Lambert's brother and sister and their families had joined them. All of them worked in the financial industry; his brother an analyst, his sister's husband a merchant banker. They just hooked up their computer modems to the phone and avoided absentee status as they watched the market plummet.

“All right, look,” Lambert said, leaning forward in his chair to rest his elbows on his desk. “I've got a trip to the U.N. next week for the debate on their relocation to Ottawa. I'll give your parents a call—I've been meaning to anyway—and try to stop by and see them.”

She smiled, sort of—baring none of her teeth—and stood to leave. It was just then that Lambert realized why he was so drawn to the girl, so interested in what she was wearing, the way she looked. For weeks, now, his only contact had been with military and civilian workers, none of whom was from the real world, from the world as it now was outside their cloistered existence. He rose and walked around the desk.

“Excuse me, Miss Livingston?”

“Nancy,” she said, holding her hand out and giving him one vigorous handshake before dropping her eyes.

“If you don't mind me asking, what's it like out there? I mean, what are people saying? What are they doing? What's life like?”