The Fury and the Terror (15 page)

"Whoa! Well, I guess you're feeling better already."

The bedroom phone rang, one of the private lines installed by the White House Communications Agency for Dunbar's stay.

"Yeah? He is? Great. Just let me get my shoes on."

Dunbar hung up and returned to the bathroom door.

"Pug? Bob Hyde's here from Washington. Don't know how long this will take. You should turn in. Long trip to Delhi tomorrow for that funeral."

His wife came out of the bathroom. She had wiped off the cold cream. Her face shone, but she looked as edgy and mean as a skinning knife. She walked past him in her half slip, breasts a-dangle, and threw herself on the bed.

"I don't want to go to India. The last time I went to India I got a kidney stone. Believe me I suffered the tortures of the damned."

"As if I could forget. Well, it was probably just a coincidence and not the curry or anything like that. Your daddy was a stone-former, wasn't he?"

Dorothea groaned. "Reminds me. I owe Mom a call. What time is it in Nebraska?"

"Too late, I'd say. You know what she's like if you disturb her sleep." Dunbar kissed the back of his wife's neck. She didn't respond. After a few moments he retreated toward the bedroom doors.

"Why don't you just have her assassinated, popsie? I'm not talking about a big show with rockets, like today. I mean something stealthy, medieval. She keels over one night after dinner. The poison proves to be untraceable."

"Whoa, is that
you
, Pug? We don't subscribe to those tactics in a democratic society."

"Rona does."

"Might as well forfeit our souls."

"Might as well, because she's taking over.
Her
tactics are whatever gets the job done."

"You just can't
talk
like this. Where do these ideas come from?"

"My great-grandfather Trace was a sheriff up and down the frontier. Square-shooter, but if it was more convenient and less fuss, he'd as lief bust the desperadoes between their shoulder blades with his .44. Oh, I know. There's the little matter of line of succession. You think that's got her stopped. But there're also all those Executive Orders that have been accumulating in the Oval Office since Dick Nixon's day. One piled on top of another, each Order nibbling away a little more of the Articles of the Constitution like waves eroding a sand beach. When she's ready to make her move, Rona will have the appropriate power. Want to know how I think she and her kindred assholes at MORG are going to deal the next hand?"

"I can't believe you, these ideas of yours."

"I have a serious mind. I've got a Masters in philosophy. Rona Harvester is summa cum laude in carnal knowledge, the cunt. Ideas? Yes, I have ideas, and I'm just a little weary of acting the overage Girl Scout and America's perfect homemaker. It's a tired routine, popsie."

"The American people expect—"

"The American people need to grow up. Let me shout that from the rooftops."

Dunbar said gently, "You haven't been skipping your recommended dosage of Luvox, have you? It
has
been a trying day."

"All of that shit gives me diarrhea, if you haven't noticed. Also I did a little research on SSRIs.
Very
bad for bipolars. Road rage? Those kids who shoot up their high schools? All of the Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors induce mania in bipolars. You wouldn't want me to go on another shoplifting spree, would you?" Dunbar winced at the thought. "Then allow me to pursue my more productive manias. Listen, Al Dunbar.
You
are the President.
You
need to get the goods, now, and pressure Rona and her crowd into revealing the sad truth that Clint Harvester is for real a drooling idiot, and get them both out of the White House posthaste. Did I tell you? I already have some neat decorating ideas."

Dunbar peered at his wife with a harried smile, unable to believe she was serious.

"Hand the ball to a flamethrower," Dorothea persisted. "Show the bitch nothing but heat until she backs out of the box." After a few moments Dorothea flopped over on her side, eyeing him suspiciously. "Or is that an option?"

Dunbar didn't say anything.

Dorothea sighed. "She knows, then. Figures."

"Please, Pugsy."

"I wish to God you had never told me."

"I wanted ... needed your forgiveness."

"How many times do I have to forgive you? Quit asking. It only increases the toll. We're all entitled to one big mistake, but did it have to be a fifteen-year-old crackhead whose father is the most famous film director in the world? And a big supporter of the Harvesters, one might add."

"Oh, God, Pug. You know I worship you."

"Good night, cocksucker. And keep your kisses to yourself. I need my shut-eye if I'm going to fly halfway around the world tomorrow."

R
obert Hyde, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was a man of fifty-four who looked ten years older. He wore his gray hair in a no-nonsense brush cut. He had the unsmiling opaqueness of a lifelong despot drained of human nuance.

Hyde didn't like anyone. He had no close personal friends, no wife, no mistress. There were two adult offspring from a very early marriage, before he had discovered how much he loathed human beings, and what a nuisance sexual relations were. Hyde seldom spoke to his daughter, who had dedicated her life and inheritance from her mother's estate to mounting expeditions that took her and platoons of scientists to places on the globe that almost no one else had ever heard of. His son loved him, for some reason. Always had. Hyde respected his intelligence and found him useful in their line of work.

But he had never been close to anyone except Allen Dunbar, to whom he owed the resurrection of his career in law enforcement after being on the losing side of a vendetta with a former Attorney General of the United States. He didn't actually like the President pro tem, but it was a relationship that had to be nurtured. Hyde was in daily contention with everyone in DoJ or Congress who didn't share his vision that only a stronger FBI could safeguard America from the recent onslaught of terrorism that had been so destructive of public morale. A demoralized America was a fatally weakened America. Hyde hammered that theme home in daily calls to members of the House Appropriations Committee, but the obscene hydra known as MORG worked the same territory, with better success. All those mouths gobbling up funds Hyde needed to beef up his Bureau, which for years before he became Director had been looking frayed at the edges, slipshod, even obsolete in the eyes of influential senators and congresspersons who had no sense of history or, if they were older, had forgotten what the FBI had meant to the country during hot and cold wars, the tireless crusade to break up the Mob.

When Hyde was twenty years younger and newly reassigned to D.C. after a successful tour as Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago office, MORG had been vulnerable. Childermass was dead; there was no clear line of succession: Multiphasic Operations and Research Group could have been smashed then and there. Unfortunately the man who was FBI Director at the time was not aggressive enough to seize the opportunity. Carsten Burrows, rid of a man he thought was a psychopath, found no further menace in MORG. Nonetheless he wasn't a fool. He put Robert Hyde in charge of a small unit of agents devoted to MORG-watching. After two decades Hyde's zeal to infiltrate and learn everything he could about MORG was still a ruling passion. He was the ranking expert in world espionage circles on MORG's structure, personnel, and modes of operation.

The crucial blank in all of his research had been the very center of Multiphasic Operations and Research Group, the source of its renewed power.

He had a face and a name: Victor Wilding. The most recent ten years of Wilding's life were thoroughly documented. Before that, nothing at all. The man had no history. Obviously Victor Wilding was not his birth name.

Who Wilding really was, where he had come from—these questions had, until recently, given Hyde dyspepsia and insomnia. Now, having acquired a single fingerprint of the usually elusive Wilding and matched it with an other print in the Bureau's files, his sleeplessness was more often caused by a hot spot of fear beneath his breastbone. Where it glowed like the tip of a cigarette smoked by someone in deep shadow, observing
him
as avidly as he had watched the man who called himself Wilding.

The FBI Director had cultivated sufficient interest in baseball to give him something to chat about with Allen Dunbar, until the civilities had been observed. Then they ceremoniously finished off small neat scotches in the oppressively decorated drawing room of the suite. The President pro tem leaned forward in an ugly Louis-the-something, heavily brocaded chair opposite Robert Hyde. Over both their heads a massive chandelier glittered distantly. Much of the drawing room was dark. Which made the two Secret Service men seated in one corner less conspicuous, although they never took their eyes off Dunbar.

"What do we know?"

Hyde never spoke to anyone in a voice much above a whisper. He liked having his listeners strain a little; expend effort to hang on to his words.

"Mr. President, in their typical fashion MORG isn't letting the Bureau get anywhere near it. But we've learned enough to make some educated guesses about what went on in Honolulu today."

"Good. What have we learned?"

Hyde took his time. "Mr. President, I'm convinced that the attack on the First Lady's motorcade was part of a grand design, additional threads in the tapestry of terror that began with the nuclear incident in Portland this February."

"Good Lord. The same warp and weft, you're saying."

"I'm also convinced the plane that crashed in Innisfall, California, at noon Pacific time, is another part of the tapestry."

"NTSB thinks that was just a regrettable accident, Bob."

"Give me credit for knowing more than the Safety Board investigators."

"Well, of course. Wasn't an accident, then, you're saying."

"The DC-10 involved was leased to the non-sked airline TRANSPAC, an infamous MORG proprietary, going all the way back to the Vietnam War, when MORG became involved in the profitable drug trafficking they continue today. TRANSPAC 1850 departed Honolulu in the wee hours of the morning. It had been parked in a remote part of the airport. There was no passenger manifest. We've learned, however, that all aboard were MORG employees except perhaps for one person, unidentified, who was removed on a stretcher at approximately two forty-five A.M. from a MH60K helicopter, the kind frequently employed by MORG in clandestine activities. The unknown person was transferred to the DC-10. Subsequently there was one crash survivor, who is in intensive care following surgery. Her name is Portia Darkfeather. I'm sure she would have some answers for us, but MORG agents out of San Francisco have the entire hospital in a vise." He waited for Dunbar to get his point, then added forcefully, "MORG again."

"Uh-huh. Yes. I see."

"And the ultimate destination of TRANSPAC 1850 was to have been Plenty Coups, Montana."

"Plenty Coups!" Dunbar said. He began running a hand across his scant hairline again, where his scalp itch was worst.

"That's correct. Plenty Coups, the ultimate in secret MORG facilities. A sixteen-billion-dollar expenditure, to date. They keep pouring money into the complex, no questions asked by a gullible Senate and pliable House. What goes on at Plenty Coups? From the types of equipment that are being ordered and shipped, it's a scientific research facility. Of course I have someone on the inside, but not—all the way inside. The place is a clearance nightmare. We have yet to penetrate to the heart of the mystery that is Plenty Coups."

"You're working on it."

"Rest assured. We'll get there."

"What's—what would you say the common thread is now, in this terrorist design,
tapestry
, as you put it?"

"Psychic research and psi training, Mr. President. MORG was a pioneer among government entities looking into the military uses of clairvoyance, mental telepathy, and something called psychometrics, which is the ability to move solid objects through mental energy alone."

"Uh-huh!" The two men stared at each other for a few moments. Dunbar said, "I'm not entirely sure I—"

"Telepathic espionage is the new paradigm for the third millennium. The battle for the human mind is the only battlefield that will matter in this century. In short—"

Dunbar edged a little closer to the Director, hands clutching his knees.

"All of MORG's resources for the past few years," Hyde continued, "have been concentrated on a single goal: the development of a new super-race of psychics. Imagine the advantage, the power to be gained from knowing every waking thought of those among us who try to resist subjugation through mind control."

"Horrifying. But—how much of this is reality, and how much is theory? Five thousand four hundred twenty-six long-distance nuclear warheads still operational in Russia and the North Koreans are pushing ahead with their TAEPO DONG 2s. Now that's a reality we can sink our teeth into."

"Most of those Cold War hangovers can and will be cured through negotiation. I have the utmost respect for your leadership in that area."