Last Gasp (47 page)

Chase reached out and gripped Nick’s shoulder. “That’s the stuff,” he chuckled. “Team spirit and unbridled enthusiasm. Aren’t you glad I came?”

“Over the moon, Gav. Over the fucking moon.”

In the act of rekindling his pipe, Lucas looked at Chase over the curling blue bowl. “You don’t seem filled with enthusiasm yourself, Gavin, unbridled or otherwise. Don’t you believe there’s a chance?”

 “I honestly don’t know. Do you?”

Lucas blew smoke through a small tight smile. “I’d say it has the ghost of a chance, which is better than none at all.”

“I’ve got the nasty feeling we’re at least twenty years too late,” Chase said. “We ought to have been doing something like this back in 1990.”

“It’s a damn pity we didn’t,” said Gene Lucas, and he wasn’t smiling anymore.

Mara had no need of a mask. Even here in the foul canyons of New York City. His pitifully thin body demanded little; its low metabolic rate meant that he was able to survive where others would fall choking and retching and coughing up bloody tissue.

Still, it was necessary and wise to move slowly and carefully. He couldn’t afford to expend energy that didn’t contribute directly to his purpose. The low oxygen content was just barely sufficient, and his unprotected eyes streamed from the effect of the poisonous miasma that clung in streamers to the tall buildings and wallowed sluggishly in the streets.

For two days Mara had made his preparations. The situation was hopeful; the mission was Go. He had only to wait for three factors to achieve confluence:

Time.

Location.

Access.

His brief gave him the flexibility to choose the optimum moment. Time and location had hardened, had narrowed down from the available options. Given these, he had now to arrange access.

He experienced neither impatience nor anticipation. He had been trained as pure function. The purpose of function was achievement of the mission. The mission would bring the Faith one small step (but one giant leap for mankind) nearer to Optimum Orbital Trajectory.

Crouching in the shadows, Mara studied the brightly illuminated entrance of the building through stinging eyes. Inside the sealed bulletproof glass enclosure he could see the ring of armed security guards. Access not possible. But the building was huge and had many entrances. There would be a way in, somewhere, and he would find it.

Mara moved on, keeping in the shadows. The harness chafed his shoulders. The cylinder of propylene underneath his black robes rubbed the flesh of his back raw. The cylinder gave him the deformed appearance and lurching gait of a hunchback. Had there been anyone to observe him he would have thought Mara one of life’s unfortunate victims. When in truth he was precisely the opposite.

The dimpled bronze doors slid open and Prothero emerged, turning the key in the panel that would send the elevator back to the ground floor. Until activated the elevator wouldn’t budge, a necessary precaution to prevent any intruder gaining access to the upper floors from the lobby. He pocketed the key and strode on to suite 4002.

Using his second key, he let himself into the penthouse. Below the tiny balcony hallway, the main living area was a deep well of mellow light and purple shadow. Sketches by Picasso and woodcuts by Munch hung on the rough-cast walls. Like a fragrance, a Mozart serenade drifted on the air, seeming to be everywhere, emanating from no particular point. On the edge of a pool of light cast by a huge table lamp, Ingrid Van Dorn sat half-reclining on a curved couch reading from a sheaf of typed pages, clear-framed reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose, an empty martini glass dangling absently in one hand. A cigarette smoldered in an ashtray on the low rectangular table in front of her, and next to the ashtray was a stack of books, used to support an open dictionary that couldn’t have weighed an ounce under four pounds.

Prothero hung his overcoat and scarf in the closet and came lithely down the parabolic staircase of open carpeted treads. In a single movement he kissed the top of her head and took the glass from her fingers. At the bar he filled two freshly chilled glasses from the silver shaker, speared two black olives, and set her drink down within reach. He leaned back along the broad arm of the couch, sipping his drink and watching her profile, content to wait.

“Is it better to say ‘poor’ or ‘impoverished’?” Ingrid nibbled her lower lip, not looking up.

“Relating to what or whom?”

“Nations.”

“ ‘Poor,’ ” Prothero said without hesitation. “ ‘Impoverished’ suggests a decline into poverty, whereas the nations you’re referring to have always been poor.” He stretched out his long legs, leaning on one elbow. “Are you going to let me read it?”

“Of course I am, Pro, darling.” Ingrid reached for her cigarette and drew on it deeply. “I would like your opinion.”

This was probably the most important speech of her career, Prothero reflected—certainly during her term of office as secretary-general. It was to be given before a plenary session of the General Assembly, all 243 countries. The world’s media would be there in force, beaming it live by satellite to every part of the globe. A potential audience of 6.2 billion people. Ingrid would be in direct touch with all those who didn’t think the annual address of the UN secretary-general a classic nonevent, a gigantic yawn.

And that was pertinent, because it was precisely what most people
did
think. Which was hardly surprising when in the past the annual speech had been a string of homogenized platitudes, each phrase, each word carefully weighted and balanced to appease everyone and offend no one. East-West, North-South, rich-poor, black-white ... keep them all happy, for God’s sake.

This time it would be different. Heartfelt pleas for worldwide cooperation were useless, they had both agreed. A complete and utter waste of time and breath. Taking up Prothero’s suggested title, “The Point of No Return,” Ingrid had worked on the speech for months, extracting information from UN files and reports, while Prothero had unearthed material from the archives of the defunct Environmental Protection Agency. This time there was to be no compromise, no half-measures. The finger of accusation was to be pointed at the industrialized nations and their abysmal record of environmental conservation. The billions of tons of noxious chemicals released into the atmosphere. The wanton spoilage of lakes and rivers and forests. The vast amounts of herbicides and pesticides still manufactured and used despite legislated controls.

The dumping of toxic and nuclear wastes in the oceans.

More important, each country would be named and its offenses cataloged. In summary, Ingrid would emphasize the vital and desperate need for all nations to forget the old hatreds and enmities: The planet was approaching the point of no return while they squabbled among themselves like greedy, spoiled children.

It was a last-ditch attempt, Prothero realized. At a more personal level he knew that he was laying his head on the political chopping block. The documented evidence he had obtained from the EPA on the strength of his standing as a senator was politically explosive—especially as it was to be vised against his own country. There would be cries of “traitor” and “treason,” and it could mean the end of his career in public office. His wife’s reaction he didn’t care about, but he was afraid of what it would do to his three children.

Ingrid let the last typewritten page flutter to the table and stubbed her cigarette out. She took off her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose. “I’ve been through it so many times the words have become meaningless.”

“It’ll be great, I know,” Prothero reassured her. “Drink your drink and relax. There’s still a few days in which to look it over.”

Ingrid smiled up at him wanly. “Before we get kicked up the ass, you mean.”

“They wouldn’t dare kick your ass, darling. It’s too pretty.” Prothero smiled, but the image in his mind, which still haunted him after all these years, had a loathsome dimension. It was of the suppurating mess of skin and bone that had been his brother Tom, a chopper pilot in Vietnam. Pro had been twenty, his brother twenty-six when he died. Agent Orange. Dioxin. Waste. Death. A sick miserable tragedy. What was his career when set against that?

“Pro,” Ingrid said anxiously. “You will be there, won’t you?”

“Ringside seat. You’re going to be terrific, Ingrid, I know it. Don’t worry!”

“I’m not worried for myself.”

“Well, we’re both of us in the firing line,” Prothero said, thinking he understood her. He realized he was mistaken when Ingrid said:

“These madmen will have marked you down, Pro. You’ve spoken out more than anyone—even more than Redman or Lautner. They’ve shown they can get to anyone, no matter who or how well they’re protected.”

It was the pyro-assassinations that worried her, not their respective political futures. Prothero waved his hand nonchalantly. “I’m too small a fish to fry.”

“Don’t make such a horrible joke!” Ingrid said, distraught. “They can do it!”

Prothero slid down beside her and took her hand. “Ingrid, honey, I can’t crawl under a rock and disappear. I know what the risk is, believe me. These ‘madmen’ as you call them are going to have to work mighty hard to get anywhere near old Pro.” He pulled her close and smelled the faint scent of lavender in the warmth of her neck.

They made love on the long curved couch. The bright pool of light under the lamp made the shadows blacker and more mysterious. Mozart gave way to Sibelius, which Prothero thought entirely appropriate, the sound of chill Nordic symmetry swirling above their heads.

Afterward, Ingrid made sandwiches and coffee while Prothero padded naked to the bathroom. He urinated, patted the underside of his chin in the mirror, stepped in the shower cubicle.

His manicured hand spun the control.

Turning his face upward to receive the hot cleansing water he found himself staring into the convex steel showerhead that contained his own distorted terrified face and elongated body inside the concentric pattern of holes.

For an instant he stared at himself. He saw the holes bubble and burst with water, and the next thing he knew he was enveloped in a warm caressing spray that soothed and subdued the hammering of his heart.

From nine thousand feet Starbuck Island resembled a pink coral necklace on plush blue velvet. The pilot of the USAF K-113 Aurora strato-shuttle banked to starboard and raised the lead-lined shutters from the tiny saucer-size windows to give his passengers their first view.

“One-third power and full flaps,” he rapped out to the flight engineer. “Check yaw and drift stabilization.”

The engineer acknowledged, throwing levers, watching gauges.

The stubby silver craft with its embryonic wings and steeply raked tail plane was ungainly at this height and speed, dominated as it was by the huge rocket engines that protruded aft from the rectangular fuselage like the gaping maw of a deep-sea predator.

The Aurora had arced across the Pacific at a height of one hundred twenty thousand feet. Because exposure to ultraviolet and cosmic radiation at this altitude could cause skin cancer and total hair loss in under an hour, the entire craft was encased in lead shielding. The passengers saw daylight only when the shutters were raised below ten thousand feet.

Strapped into a padded reclining seat, Lt. Cy Skrote stared rigidly at the curved ceiling panel directly above him. The muscles on his thin freckled neck were corded and covered in perspiration. He’d never liked flying, but he absolutely hated rocket flights. The high g forces on lift-off and reentry made him fear he might lose control of his bodily functions.

In the seat next to his, nearest the window, Maj. Jarvis Jones was leaning forward against the straps, straining to see outside, a black hand cupped to his eyes to reduce glare. Nothing got to him, thought Skrote. Made out of rock.

Yet if Jones was rock, what in hell was Colonel Madden in the seat in front, who’d spent the two-and-a-half-hour six-thousand-mile flight with an open file across his knees? Skrote guessed that for him it was simply the quickest way of getting from A to B over long distances. End of story.

Skrote instinctively gripped the arms of his seat as the pitch of the engines deepened. The rapid deceleration was making his eyeballs bulge. Luckily for him, the pilot was experienced and brought the Aurora in on the first pass, lining her up dead-center on the twelve-thousand-foot floating concrete runway anchored two miles off the island. Fifteen minutes later the three ASP officers could taste salt on their lips as the launch cut a creamy swathe through the glittering blue ocean.

“I never expected this!” Skrote shouted. The warm wind snatched his words away. He gestured all around with one hand, holding on to his peaked cap with the other.

“The oxygen level is only a fraction of a percent below normal in this area,” Madden called back. He pointed. “Two thousand miles southwest of here, on the other side of the Kermadec Trench, it’s solid weed. New Zealand is completely surrounded. Have to evacuate soon.”

Cy Skrote raised his sparse eyebrows and nodded. Marine ecology wasn’t his subject.