Fire (9 page)

Better. Easier. Or not better, exactly; the alcohol didn’t make him feel good. It just made him feel less, and it was good to feel less of his circumstances at the moment.

He took a sip from the brimming glass and sighed. It wasn’t until he’d had that sip that he realized that the stewardess was still standing in the aisle beside him. He looked up and saw that her hands were trembling, and that her eyes were tight and bloodshot and fearful-looking.

“I was waiting — I wanted to . . .” She pursed her lips and looked away; Luke half expected her to cry. “I just wanted to get your empties. Damn it all.” She sniffled, and then suddenly her voice was a stewardess’s, calm and serene and relaxed even though there was every reason to panic. “I’m sorry. Can I take those for you?”

Luke’s head was spinning, partly from the whiskey, partly from confusion. “Yes — sure. Go ahead.” He pulled his arms away from the tray where the bottles rested, to give her free access to the bottles. “Anything I can do to help?”

The question surprised her, threw her off balance; for just an instant she looked as though she’d reached the brink of her self-control. Was she going to scream — ? No, already she was calming again, her face relaxing into a role it obviously found comfortable. “No,” she said, “I’m fine. Everything’s fine here.”

“You’re sure?”

She smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything’s going to be just fine.” And she turned and walked away before he could say another word.

That conversation unnerved Luke maybe more than anything else had that night; maybe because the woman’s voice so obviously told him that she was lying to him, and that probably she wasn’t even admitting the lie to herself. She was like him, like a bad caricature of him, lying to himself, telling himself it was all going to work out. Being brave when that was probably the stupidest thing he could do.

He took a sip of the whiskey — a thin one, so that the cup would last — pulled the in-flight magazine from the pocket of the chair in front of him. And started reading. Reading was always good for keeping his mind from the world around him.

He was half-way through the magazine and almost done with the whiskey when he drifted off to sleep.

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Chapter Four

WASHINGTON

The Secret Service men kept telling Vice President Graham Perkins that there was nothing to worry about. The mob outside, they said, wanted the President’s blood. None of the teeming mass out there had shown the least interest in Blair House, or in the Vice President. He was as forgotten now as he had been for the last eighteen months, and for once it was a blessing.

That was what they told him, anyway. Graham had trouble making himself believe it. He was certain, in his heart of hearts, that the bloodthirsty throng outside his window would kill him if only it knew to look for him.

It was a nightmare — a nightmare that stretched far into his past, and into the future as far as Graham Perkins could imagine.

For Graham the nightmare had started two years ago, all the way back at the Reform Party National Convention.

The convention where Paul Green had made Graham his running mate.

He’d been a natural choice; Graham was a good political balance for Paul Green. Where Green was a Midwesterner and a member of the party’s right-wing fringe, Graham was from the East, from New England, in fact, and you weren’t likely to find more centrist a Reformer than Graham Perkins. He was so much a centrist, in fact, that there’d been those in Green’s coalition who’d looked at Graham’s Senate voting record and screamed at the top of their lungs that while he might be a Reformer, he voted like a Democrat. And they’d wanted to know what business he had being on a ticket with Paul Green.

When he’d heard those people shouting, out there in the convention hall, he’d actually given two minutes’ thought to the idea of turning down the nomination. Then it’d been a senseless idea; the people who were shouting were only the lunatic fringe of Green’s coalition. They might be loud, and they might be unpleasant, but in the end they were too few in number to be genuinely important.

A hundred times since then Graham had wished he’d listened to his good sense there, in the steamy-sweaty Miami heat of that convention. He was certain now that his unconscious mind had been trying to speak to him, and he’d long since decided that he would listen to that part of him more carefully in the future. If he’d listened, things would never have come to this. It was even possible that without Graham on the ticket Green would never have been able to get elected — any Presidential ticket with the man’s name on it was desperately in need of balancing. And there weren’t many people who could have balanced him better than Graham had.

He almost did back out a week later, after all the loudness and excitement of Miami was over, and Graham and Paul Green had been able to take a day to get to know each other so that they’d be able to campaign together comfortably. Graham hadn’t realized until that meeting exactly how unhinged Green was. The man tried to hide it. He even seemed to think he managed to succeed in keeping his crazier ideas to himself. He didn’t. They were always there, flickering behind his small, pale eyes; caught on his tongue before they were spoken, but never caught before Graham saw them coming.

“So,” Green had said, stirring a third spoon of sugar into his cup of instant coffee, “what was it brought you into politics, Gram?” Paul Green had always pronounced his name that way — as though Graham were a measurement or a grandmother, and not himself. “What brings a man like you into this business?”

They were on the plane that the party’s campaign committee had leased for the duration, flying cross-country from Virginia to San Diego. Once they got there, they’d have the rest of today and most of tomorrow to catch their breath and get to know each other. Then, tomorrow evening, the first big rally after the convention. They weren’t quite alone on the plane, but they might as well have been. There were no reporters, and Green’s closest aides were all asleep, trying to recover from the hecticness of the last few weeks — it hadn’t been an easy ride into the convention for the Green campaign; Tom Cohen, from New York, had actually been a few delegates ahead of Green on the first ballot. The campaigning and politicking and infighting at the convention had been even more intense than it had during the primaries.

“Why politics. . . ?” The question caught Graham off balance — it had been years since he’d asked it of himself. Long enough, in fact, that he no longer had an answer for it. The truth was that political office had pretty well happened to him. He’d come back from Korea with a handful of medals, and there’d been a spot on the town council open, and before he’d even realized what was happening the town’s mayor had him on the Reform slate. Fifteen years later he’d been a Senator. Still. It was the sort of question you had to have an answer for, or to be able to make an answer for, if you were a politician. Graham Perkins lied easily and naturally when the need arose; it wasn’t a thing he was proud of, but he did it when he had to. “Government,” he said, “is a place where I can make a difference. I think it’s important to give your best to the world.”

Green paused in the middle of setting his coffee on the table between them, and looked Graham in the eye long and deep and hard. After a moment he’d nodded, finished setting down his coffee, and sighed.

“I think I can understand that, Perkins,” he said. “Hell — I can see that, if you know what I mean.”

Graham didn’t know what he meant, but he smiled anyway, warmly as he could, and nodded in agreement.

Paul Green’s grin was almost bashful. “I remember — I remember . . .” he said. “When I was just a boy, I always said to my Momma, I said, ‘Momma, it’s an evil world out there. And somebody’s got to do something about it. And Momma, that somebody is gonna be me.’ That’s what I said. And my Momma, she’d smile warm enough to light up the whole room, ‘cause I was her boy Paul. I’ll tell you, Perkins — ain’t no woman can smile like my Momma could. All my life I been watching, and I ain’t never seen a one could do it. Not a woman out there can hold a candle to my Momma.” As he spoke he took out a thick, vile-looking black cigar and lit the thing. The smoke it gave off smelled, somehow, a little worse than the cigar looked.

Graham coughed. “Do you really think the world is that bad a place, Paul? Honestly, I’d be the last man in the world to say that we lived in Eden . . . But evil. . . ? I don’t know.”

Paul Green’s tiny eyes seemed to grow even smaller. And angry; the effect made Graham think of a rough New England storm, welling up on the horizon. He sighed. “Perkins — how can you say a thing like that? You’re a bright man, and you’re not a bad man, I don’t think. You’ve been living in this world a good fifty years. Have your eyes been closed all that time?”

Green paused a long moment, waiting for an answer, but Graham didn’t know what to say. There was invective in Green’s voice, so much of it that he was half afraid Green was going to put his hands around his neck and throttle him. He frowned, and worked hard to keep the anger and the fear he felt from showing on his face. “No, Paul. I wouldn’t say my eyes had been closed. But I can tell you: the world I live in isn’t an evil one. It may have its faults, but it isn’t evil.”

“You’re wrong, Perkins. Bad-wrong. Have you ever read your Bible? Have you noticed how much this nation — this whole damned world — is like the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah? This world needs cleansing, Perkins. The kind of cleansing that only the fire of righteousness can bring!”

Cleansing by fire?

Green had cleared his throat, and flushed, as though he’d said much more than he’d intended to. And then he’d changed the subject completely, and steered conversation as far from the subject as he could.

But Graham had heard what he’d said. Just as he heard half a dozen more times over that day and the next, when Green had let himself slip. By the time their “getting to know each other” time was over, Graham was more than half convinced that the man was crazy enough to start a nuclear war.

Damn it, the idea was crazy — too crazy to believe. No one in his right mind wanted to blow up the world. And how could anyone who wasn’t sane get as far through the political process as Green had? And Graham had already accepted the nomination. Sure, he could pull himself out of the race — but doing that would almost certainly put an end to his political career.

Looking back, Graham knew that had been what had really stopped him. Cowardice. Two thirds of his life, now, he’d been in politics, and he hadn’t had the courage to leave that much of his life behind him.

The knowledge shamed him.

Outside his window the mob roared, surging in the street. It was Paul Green’s blood that they wanted, and not Graham’s; if he told himself so often enough and hard enough, Graham thought, he might actually begin to believe it.

Paul Green.

Green had been . . . well, stable wasn’t a word that could really apply to a man like Paul Green. But it almost might; in the first fifteen months of his Presidency Green had proven himself capable and not nearly the lunatic Graham had feared he might be. And then, three months ago. . . .

When he thought about it Graham could almost find himself sympathizing with the man. His wife had gone off to Russia — ostensibly on a “good will” mission, though the fact of the matter was that the woman was using her position to travel as a VIP tourist — and she’d fallen ill. Some minor thing; food poisoning or some such.

Senseless — so senseless!

And the Russian doctor who was treating her had made a terrible, terrible error, given her penicillin against the possibility of infection. Which would have been no problem at all, if not for that fact that the First Lady had been allergic to penicillin. Severely allergic; the reaction had killed her within twenty minutes.

Paul Green hadn’t been the same man since. Bellicose, belligerent, constantly trying to provoke the Russians into . . . into God knew what. And now this: sending a friend into Russia on a suicide mission. Sending him into the country as a tourist, carrying a portable nuclear device.

The Russians had caught the man, of course. They weren’t stupid; they took reasonable precautions. And what had Paul Green done? Had he acted ashamed for attempting something vile? No. Just the opposite. He’d demanded that they set his friend loose.

Now he was threatening to send the whole world to kingdom come if they didn’t do as he asked. There wasn’t much chance of that. Or so the Intelligence people had said this afternoon when they’d briefed Graham. The Pentagon had a firm hold over the people in the silos, and there was no way Paul Green was going to be allowed to call a first strike while impeachment proceedings were underway.

The man from Intelligence had seemed relatively certain on that critical point, but even so he hadn’t managed to convince Graham — not beyond doubt, at any rate.

Somewhere out in the riot outside his window, a woman was screaming with rage.

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Chapter Five

FRIDAY

July Fifteenth

Leigh Doyle was a would-be.

A would-be writer.

Oh, she made her living writing, all right. Made a good living, too; good enough to send her to Moscow for her vacation this year, just as it had sent her to Kenya last year and to Rio de Janeiro the year before. But the living she made came from writing the worst possible sort of trash for a supermarket tabloid, the National Interlocutor.

Leigh didn’t harbor any illusions about the National Interlocutor. It was a rag, a godawful rag, and the work she did for it had no value whatsoever. None outside the wage that it paid her. Sure: she was one of the paper’s best correspondents. She had a real knack for sifting through the news, sifting through the British and South American papers to find those unlikely stories that were the Interlocutor’s grist. She had a knack for tracking down and following up those stories, too; she always managed to find fresh material and fresh angles that the other tabloids missed. Still, ephemera was ephemera, and Leigh didn’t have a problem being honest with herself about the fact.