Blackmail Earth (33 page)

Walker cuffed him. Then the big dawg read him his rights. But Jason didn’t hear much beyond the “Anything you say can and will be used against you” because the words “murdering sex maniac” kept bouncing around his rattled brain.

Much as he could see, Aly was alive and so was everyone else standing around—all the damn cops, EMTs, and firemen with their big red extinguishers just in case his truck burst into flames. So where were all the dead people? Where was even
one
dead person?

The answer came to him with the greatest reluctance, as cold and clear and deadly as black ice. That’s when he knew that driving naked, even with an underage honey, would likely prove the least of his worries—and the last sex he’d ever have outside a prison cell.

*   *   *

Forensia eased off the gas when she spotted the highway patrol officer directing traffic into a single lane. Two ambulances and five patrol cars, including Sheriff Walker’s old Bronco, lined the side of the road, lights flashing in the setting sun. A pickup truck lay upside down about fifty feet from the shoulder. It had driven through a farm fence; broken slats littered the ground and a post had been sheared off to a ten-inch stub.

“I wonder if anybody’s hurt?” Richtor said from the backseat.

Slowing down forced the small green SUV—a RAV4, as it turned out—to within spitting distance of Forensia’s car. Akina’s shiny red Prius was two cars ahead.

Sang-mi pretended to fix her unflappably straight hair in the sun visor mirror—with her gaze firmly on the vehicle behind them.

“I can see them now. They are definitely Korean.” She shrunk into the seat, as if she expected bullets to come flying through the car at any second.

“There are cops here, let’s just pull over.” Forensia slowed her Subaru.

“No!” Sang-mi shouted. “Don’t stop. They don’t care about police. Keep moving. I’m not kidding. They will kill us.”

Shaken, Forensia kept driving.

“There are thousands, probably tens of thousands of Koreans in New York,” Richtor said. “I think they own every other fruit stand in the city. Maybe they’re ordinary, innocent people.”

Sang-mi shook her head. “Go, go,” she said to Forensia.

But they were forced to creep past the accident as a young man crawled out of the driver’s window. The RAV4 stayed close.

Forensia kept checking her rearview mirror to keep an eye on the SUV and the road ahead to make sure that
she
didn’t drive off the road. As she drew even with the wreck, she glanced over at it, just when the young man turned his head.

“It’s Jason,” she shouted as the sheriff handcuffed him. Everyone in the car turned to look. An EMT led a young woman in a blanket to one of the ambulances.

“Whoever she is, she looks like she got off lucky,” Richtor said.

Sang-mi stayed scrunched down in the seat. A quarter mile later the RAV4 turned onto the highway heading south to the city. The young Korean woman stared silently till the small SUV disappeared under an overpass.

*   *   *

In the White House Situation Room, President Reynolds stared at the supertanker on the TV screen and shook his large head. Bad enough that he had to listen to a washed-up correspondent with a chopped-off thumb mouthing the implacable demands of Al Qaeda, but now the North Koreans had sent him a top secret communiqué that announced they were going to exploit the crisis as much as they could.

Reynolds lowered his eyes to the President’s Daily Brief, which summarized all the threats to the United States; the North Korean communiqué was item number one. That dingdong kingdom was ruled by a crazy little bastard in platform shoes who Reynolds long ago had dubbed “the Demon Dwarf.” This morning the Dwarf was saying that he would launch thousands of missiles loaded with sulfates that would explode in the stratosphere—releasing billions of sun-blocking particles—if the United States didn’t send his country massive shipments of food, grains, seeds, and a full array of high-tech gear for everything from agriculture to nuclear arms. The creepy Dwarf also wanted the top
twenty
U.S. coal-fired plants shut down, no doubt to top Al Qaeda’s demand to close ten of them. There was to be no public disclosure of any of this, of course, “including the receipt of this communiqué.”

The Dwarf insisted on secrecy in everything. No wonder that was his first condition. But Reynolds hated,
hated
the idea of complying with any of Demon Dwarf’s demands. The first concession in any government-to-government negotiation set the tone for every issue to follow. Complying with anything that crazy weasel wanted would send the wrong signal, and it would put the United States on a slippery slope long greased by the blood of his foes. Much better, Reynolds thought, to reveal the Dwarf’s threat to the planet so that everyone would know what he’d slipped into his silos. Neutralize the bastard with exposure. But if Reynolds did not keep North Korea’s secrets, the madman might very well launch his sun-blocking missiles, spreading SPF 1,000 all over Mother Earth.

The goddamned dictator had boxed him into a corner three days before the election. It was just like the little creep to pull a stunt like this when the last thing Reynolds needed was a crisis of this magnitude seventy-two hours before voting booths opened for business.

What would Lilton and his merry band of destroyers make of this wrinkle if it became public?
Wrinkle? Hell, it’s a political San Andreas Fault,
Reynolds warned himself.
Imagine the attack ads. Merciless. Murderous.
“Reynolds let America’s most dangerous enemy build thousands of deadly missiles that could destroy the whole world. And now he wants you to give him four more years? Say
no
to Reynolds. Say
no
to North Korean terrorists.” Horrible.

If Reynolds made the Korean’s demands public, missiles might begin flying. Yet if he stayed mum, it would encourage the man’s madness.

Reynolds’s cabinet and the directors of the National Security Agency, the FBI, and the CIA were waiting for his response to the Daily Brief. At last Reynolds looked up.

“Before we get started on the subject of secret communiqués, what did we find out about
that
guy,” Reynolds nodded at Rick Birk, jawing away on a silent screen, “and his blinking eyeballs? Anything worthwhile?”

The NSC chief said, “Our code breakers have found intriguing links to a little-known drumming pattern of the Lokele tribe in the Congo.”

“No kidding?” Reynolds grinned. “Where did that old bugger come up with something like that?”

“That’s puzzling and a little troubling,” the CIA chief answered from the cheap seats at the far end of the table. “He doesn’t appear to ever have had any interest in anything African, other than a liqueur called Amarula.”

“Well, what was he saying with his eyes then?” Reynolds asked the NSC director.

“Four words, sir: ‘fire mountain’ and ‘cow curd.’”

“‘Cud. Cow
cud,
’” said a bony woman to the NSC director’s right.

“Cow cud? Cow curd? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Reynolds demanded.

No one answered.

Reynolds couldn’t believe this shit. “That’s it? Fire mountain. Cow curd, or cud?”

An uneasy silence followed before Vice President Andrew Percy said, “It’s possible, Mr. President, that he’s just jerking their chain.”

“Or ours,” Reynolds volleyed.
Goddamn code breakers could hear
The Bells of St. Mary’s
in a conch shell.

The president rose to his full height. “Why didn’t we know about these sulfates until North Korea decided it was time to tell us?” Reynolds still couldn’t get over that.

“Mr. President, we did know about them,” said Debra Abrams, the White House national security adviser. She nodded at the CIA chief.

“That’s correct, Mr. President,” the director concurred. “We’ve been debriefing a North Korean defector from their U.N. mission.”

“Then why am I the last to know what he’s been telling us?”

“Verification, sir. We considered the information to be so outlandish that we thought we might be dealing with a double agent. We had to verify everything from sources in situ.”

“And have you?”

“Yes, sir. Those rockets are real.”

“And they’ll really bring on years of winter? Worldwide calamity?”

“That’s right, sir,” Abrams answered.

Reynolds groaned. He couldn’t believe he was enduring this political migraine because of sulfates.
Of all the goddamn things.
Hadn’t he played around with them with a kiddy chemistry set when he was nine years old? Here he’d worried for years about the North’s nuclear capabilities, and now they were threatening to bring down the planet with stuff that you could buy in toy stores and hobby shops. Like being attacked with a garden hoe, till you found out that the hoe was about to chop down the sky.

“What about a preemptive strike? Is that viable?” he asked.

“We’d lose Tokyo and Seoul immediately,” Abrams said. “The Supreme Leader, as he insists on being called, made it clear many times that the instant the North Koreans detect an attack from the U.S. or NATO, they’re unloading their silos on those two cities. And if he does that, you can presume that he’ll launch those sulfate rockets, too.”

Reynolds sat down and massaged his brow. “What about wiggle room? Do we have any?”

“We tell him that we’ll give him food aid, that we’ve always been concerned about the welfare of the North Korean people, and that—”

“The usual palaver,” Reynolds cut in. “He’s heard that before. Hell, if I had to hear that meaningless claptrap one more time,
I’d
push the button.” From the stares he received from around the long table, he realized that he’d better add the standard-issue disclaimer: “I’m joking. Jesus, folks, get real. What are we going to do?”

“We buy time,” Abrams said icily.

“What about giving the Dwarf a brownout, or a blackout even? Briefly shut down the plants to send him a signal that we’re serious about negotiating. Can we do that?” he asked his energy secretary.

The energy secretary nodded. “We can.”

Reynolds liked his direct and satisfying answer. “If we’re going to give the Dwarf something in the first round, give him something that feels real. We could think of it as earnest money, a way to say ‘We feel your pain.’ Domestically, we could blame it on a broken transformer, but tell him privately that it was to show our good faith.”

“The problem, Mr. President,” Abrams said, “is that Al Qaeda’s demanding a shutdown of coal-fired plants, too, and if we have a power outage of any note,
they
will take public credit for it. They’ll say it’s a sign of how they’re already dragging the Great Satan to his knees. They’re not going to be quiet.”

“Voters would see that as capitulating to Arab terrorists,” said Ralph Ebbing, Reynolds’s chief of staff, who was leaning against an Oval Office wall a few feet from his boss. “You cannot let that happen.”

“So no blackouts then.” Reynolds leaned back. “Okay, let’s send him a C-17 filled with food. Promise him thousands of tons more.”

“You couldn’t get a single-engine Cessna with a bushel of wheat to Pyongyang without some aviation geek somewhere Tweeting about it. Sending aid to North Korea? Right before the election?” said the chief of staff incredulously.

Yup, he’s right.
Reynolds looked around the room and reached out, his hands palms up, like a beggar. “Ideas, anyone? Time is short here.”

“We reply that we are looking at any and all ways to satisfy his requests,” Abrams said. “And we tell him that we will keep our communications secret, as he’s asked.”

“Basically, we give the bastard the first round,” Reynolds said, “and hope that keeps him happy for a few hours.”

“I’m afraid so. It’s the best way to buy time and get you reelected. The last thing the world needs right now is a loss of your leadership.”

Reynolds harrumphed, but not because of Abrams’s toadying. A heretical thought had struck him: After spending more than a billion dollars on this campaign, it wouldn’t matter who was president if those missiles went airborne.

*   *   *

“Jason Robb, you are charged with the murder of Linda Pareles, also known as GreenSpirit.”

Sheriff Walker spoke formally to Jason in the command post for the joint federal, state, and local investigation into GreenSpirit’s killing. The sheriff sounded as if he’d never met the young man before. As if he hadn’t watched Jason come of age in this small town. As if the Sheriff’s daughters hadn’t gone to high school with the boy.

Walker hadn’t told the FBI or the New York State Police that he’d planned to arrest Jason. His move came after GreenSpirit’s blood had been identified on the scrap of bandana.

None of the agents and state police officers congratulated him. The sheriff’s brow wrinkled as he gazed at his colleagues.

“You want to make your call?” Walker asked Jason, like the kid was such an arrest veteran now that the sheriff didn’t need to explain that all he got was the one call.

“Sure,” Jason said jauntily. “This is bullshit.” When he spoke, the kid looked at the FBI agents. He didn’t sound remotely disturbed by the murder charge.

The FBI profiler, Barb Lassiter, appeared to study the young man. Not in disgust. Probing—that’s what it looked like, as if there were more for her to find out.

She might have suspected she was dealing with a serial killer in her midst. The murder of that Pagan in Vermont and GreenSpirit’s killing bore the same “signature,” as experts like Lassiter referred to it: eyeballs plucked from the skull and left on a floor in candle wax. And Lassiter had been told by Sheriff Walker that on the night of the Vermont murder Jason Robb hadn’t been seen by anyone in town. Not even by his parents. He’d taken off for parts unknown in that old truck of his.

*   *   *

At sundown, the Pagans gathered in the circle of white stones in which GreenSpirit had initiated Forensia and Sang-mi.

They’d set up the altar as she had instructed them only two weeks ago, using the twig broomstick called a besom, iron cauldron, boline, candles, incense, and the animal skin pentagram. Now they sat, hand-in-hand—for this could take all night—and began to chant a secret invocation, asking for GreenSpirit’s guidance. The world felt leaden with the worst eventualities. Forensia remembered feeling like this as a young teen, as if an apocalypse were about to rain down from the sky. But this felt worse because now she knew that it could really happen.