The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (51 page)

Not so the cluster of federal agencies around the Mall. FEMA and the FBI were both less than three thousand feet from ground zero; and pity the employees of the Department of Agriculture, across
the road from the museum. More than eleven thousand people, mostly government employees and tourists, were directly affected by the second bomb, half of them killed by heat flash or shock wave as
the rippling blast tore the heart out of the federal government.

And then there was the third device.

*

Eleven-sixteen and thirty-eight seconds. Two figures in desert fatigues bearing sergeant’s stripes – Kurt and Jurgen, who were in fact, by grace of his lordship
Baron Griben ven Hjalmar, sergeants-at-arms of the post – appeared out of nowhere on the second floor of a car park adjacent to the Pentagon, one of them standing and the other sprawling atop
a wheelbarrow that also contained an olive-drab cylinder.

‘
Scheisse
,’ said Jurgen, as Kurt swung his feet over the side of the barrow and stood up. Beneath the low concrete roof half the theft alarms of half the vehicles in the park
were shrilling in an earsplitting cacophony that filled his head and threatened to overflow when he opened his mouth, a profoundly unnatural counterpoint to the low rumbling from outside.

‘This way.’ Kurt, eyes flickering side-to-side, pointed along a line of parked trucks and SUVs towards a bare concrete wall with a fire door. Jurgen swallowed bile, picked up the
handles of the wheelbarrow, tried to ignore the nausea in his stomach. His feet lurched side-to-side as he shoved the heavy load towards the stairwell. ‘
Two minutes.
’

‘Two? Okay.’ Jurgen nodded. Everything was crystal clear, suffused with a luminosity of migraine. The Boss couldn’t be blamed for taking these little precautions, he could see
that. ‘How about here – ’

‘No, we want a stairwell – ’

‘You! Freeze!’ Jurgen stumbled. The guard who had just stepped out of the stairwell –
Why is there a guard here
? – had his M16 raised. ‘Identify yourselves!
Sir!’ The military courtesy didn’t in any way detract from the pointed message of the assault rifle. This wasn’t in the plan. Jurgen’s head pounded.

‘What’s happening?’ called Kurt.

‘Full lockdown. Badges,
now
!’ Another siren joined the clamoring car alarms – this one full-voiced and deep, the stentorian honking of a building alarm.

Kurt raised his left hand, then reached inside a trouser pocket. Time slowed to a crawl as he rolled sideways towards a parked F-250. Jurgen dropped the barrow’s handles and broke right,
diving for the opposite side of the row to take cover behind a Toyota compact. As he reached for his Glock, an earsplitting crackle of full-auto fire echoed from one end of the car park to the
other. Grounded behind the Toyota, he rose to kneel, raised his pistol, and returned fire through the car’s windows – not aimed, but suppressive. He winced with each pull of the trigger
as the reports rammed ice picks into his already aching head. He couldn’t be sure, but Kurt seemed to be shooting, too. Another hammer-drill burst of automatic fire, then the guard’s
weapon fell silent.

‘Kurt, wer ist – ’

The harsh bang of another pistol shot was followed almost immediately by the irregular snap of rifle fire, and Jurgen ducked, heart hammering and mouth dry.
There’s more than one of
them,
he realized, icy horror settling into his belly. The plan was simple enough – he’d brought Kurt over, Kurt was to carry him back – but with him pinned down behind this
automobile, there was no way that was going to work. He swallowed and rubbed his left sleeve against the car, trying to expose the temporary tattoo on his wrist. If world-walking twice in five
minutes didn’t kill him, there was a good chance a three-floor fall would do the job, but the ticking nightmare in the barrow was an even more certain exit ticket.

‘
Ish’ vertrich nu!
’ He shouted, then stared at the knot on his wrist until it expanded into a white-hot pain between his eyes.

Falling. Into silence.

Behind him, ten meters up the aisle from where Kurt’s bleeding body lay and twenty meters from the sentries crouched behind a Humvee, the thing in the wheelbarrow emitted a click, then a
muffled bang, and finally a wisp of smoke that coiled towards the ceiling. The detonation sequencer had done its job, but this particular FADM had missed its last maintenance check due to a
bookkeeping irregularity. The constant warm rain of neutrons from the high-purity plutonium pit had, over the years, degraded the detonators distributed around its shell of high explosives. Overdue
for tear-down and reconstruction half a decade ago, the bomb failed to explode; instead, the long-term storable core began to burn, fizzing and smoldering inside its casing.

Not all the detonators had degraded. When the high explosive sphere finally blew seventy seconds later, it killed four marine guards as they advanced from truck to truck, closing in on the
hostiles’ last known location. But the blast was unsequenced and asymmetric. Rather than imploding the weapon’s pit and triggering a fission chain reaction, it merely fragmented it and
blasted chunks of hot plutonium shrapnel into the surrounding cars and concrete structure of the car park.

*

July 16, 2003, eleven o’clock and thirty minutes, local time; fighters roared, circling overhead. Beneath the leaden, smoldering skies the clocks had stopped; all
electronics had been killed by the electromagnetic pulses. And though the survivors were stirring, shocky and dazed but helping one another shuffle away from the burning holes of the city in every
direction – north, south, east, and west – nothing now would ever come to any good.

Stop all the clocks.

It had taken Steve nearly an hour to get Fleming out of his office, during which time he’d gotten increasingly irritated with the skinny, intense agent’s insistence
that some insane conspiracy of interdimensional nuclear narcoterrorists was about to blow up the Capitol.
Why do the fruitcakes always pick on
me
?
he kept wondering.

Of course the explosion in Braintree checked out – gas mains, according to the wire feed. But that was no surprise: It was the sort of detail a paranoid would glom onto and integrate into
their confabulation, especially if it happened close to their front door. One of the first warning signs of any delusional system was the conviction that the victim was at the center of events. Tom
Brokaw wasn’t reading the news, he was sending you a personal message, encrypted in the twitches of his left eyebrow.

Sure Fleming didn’t seem particularly unhinged – other than insofar as his story was completely bugfuck insane and required the listener to suspend their belief in the laws of
physics and replace it with the belief that the government was waging a secret war against drug dealers from another dimension – but that meant nothing. Steve had been a beat journalist for
years before he found his niche on the tech desk. Journalists attract lunatics like dog turds attract flies, and he’d listened to enough vision statements by dot-com CEOs to recognize the
signs of a sharp mind that had begun to veer down a reality tunnel lined with flashing lights and industrial espionage. So he’d finally cut Fleming off, halfway down a long, convoluted
monologue that seemed to be an attempt to explain how Beckstein had got his attention – not without qualms, because Fleming sounded halfway to stalkerdom when he got onto the subject of
rescuing her from some kind of arranged marriage – and raised his hand. ‘Look,’ he said wearily, ‘this is a bit much. You said they made you translate tapes. And there are
these lockets they use for, what did you call it, world-walking. Do you have any kind of, you know, physical evidence? Because you can appreciate this is kind of a complex story and we can’t
run it without fact-checking, and – ’

Fleming stood up. ‘Okay.’ He looked exasperated. ‘I got it.’

Steve peered up at him owlishly. ‘I don’t want to blow you off. But you’ve got to see – they’ll laugh me out of the meeting if I can’t back this up with
something physical. And this isn’t my department. I’m not the desk editor you’re looking for – ’

Fleming nodded again, surprising him. ‘Okay. Look,’ he glanced at his watch, ‘I’ll phone you again after they make their move. I don’t think we’ll have long
to wait. Remember what I said?’

Steve nodded back at him, deadpan. ‘Atom bombs.’

‘You think I’m nuts. Well, I’m not. At least I don’t
think
I am. But I can’t afford to stick around right now. Let’s just say, if a terrorist nuke goes
off in one of our cities in the next week, I’ll be in touch and we can talk again. Okay?’

‘You got it.’ Steve clicked his recorder off. ‘Where are you going?’

‘That would be telling.’ Fleming ducked out of his cubicle without looking back. By the time Steve levered himself out of his chair and poked his head around the partition, he was
gone.

‘Who was that?’ asked Lena from real estate, who was just passing with a coffee.

‘J. Random Crank. Probably not worth worrying about – he seemed harmless.’

‘You’ve got to watch them,’ she said worriedly. ‘Sometimes they come back. Why didn’t you call security?’

‘I wish I knew.’ Steve rubbed his forehead. The shrill buzz of his phone dragged him back inside the cubicle. He picked up the receiver, checking the caller ID: It was Tony in
editorial. ‘Steve speaking, can I – ’

‘Turn on your TV,’ Tony interrupted. Something in his tone made Steve’s scalp crawl.

‘What channel?’ he demanded.

‘Any of them.’ Tony hung up. All around the office, the phones were going mad.
No, it can’t be,
Steve thought, dry-swallowing. He moused over to the TV tuner icon on his
desktop and double-clicked to open it. And saw:

*

Two lopsided mushroom clouds roiling against the clear blue sky before a camera view flecked with static, both leaning towards the north in the grip of a light breeze
–

‘Vehicles are being turned back at police checkpoints. Meanwhile, National Guard units – ’

A roiling storm of dust and gravel like the aftermath of the collapse of the Twin Towers –

‘Vice president, at an undisclosed location, will address the nation – ’

A brown-haired woman on CNN, her normal smile replaced by a rictus of shock, asking someone on the ground questions they couldn’t answer –

People, walking, from their offices. Dirty and shocked, some of them carrying their shoes, briefcases, helping their neighbors –

‘Reports that the White House was the target of the attack cannot be confirmed yet, but surviving eyewitnesses say – ’

A flashback view from a surveillance camera somewhere looking out across the Potomac,
flash
and it’s gone, blink and you’ve missed it –

‘Residents warned to stay indoors, keep doors and windows closed, and to drink only bottled – ’

*

Minutes later Steve stared into the toilet bowl, waiting for his stomach to finish twisting as he ejected the morning’s coffee grounds and bile.
I had him in my
office,
he thought.
Oh Jesus.
It wasn’t the thought that he’d turned down the scoop of a lifetime that hurt like a knife in the guts:
What if I’d listened to
him?
Probably it had been too late already. Probably nothing could have been done. But the possibility that he’d had the key to averting this situation sitting in his cubicle, trying to
explain everything with that slightly flaky twitch – the man who knew too much – that was too much to bear. Assuming, of course, that Fleming was telling the truth when he said he
wasn’t the guy behind the bombs.
That
needed checking out, for sure.

When he finally had the dry heaves under control he straightened up and, still somewhat shaky, walked over to the washbasins to clean himself up. The face that stared at him, bleary-eyed above
the taps, looked years older than the face he’d shaved in the bathroom mirror at home that morning.
What have we done?
he wondered. The details were in the dictaphone; he’d zoned
out during parts of Fleming’s spiel, particularly when it had been getting positively otherworldly. He remembered bits – something about medieval antipersonnel mines, crazy stuff about
prisoners with bombs strapped to their necks – but the big picture evaded him, like a slippery mass of jelly that refused to be nailed down, like an untangled ball of string. Steve took a
deep breath.
I’ve got to get Fleming to call in,
he realized. A faint journalistic reflex raised its head:
It’s the story of a lifetime.
Or the citizen’s arrest of a
lifetime.
Is a nuclear unabomber even possible?

J. Barrett Armstrong’s office on the tenth floor was larger than Steve Schroeder’s beige cubicle on the eighth. It had a corner of the building to itself, with a view of Faneuil Hall
off to one side and a mahogany conference table the size of a Marine Corps helicopter carrier tucked away near the inner wall of the suite. It was the very image of a modern news magnate’s
poop deck, shipshape and shining with the gleaming elbow grease of a dozen minimum-wage cleaners; the captain’s quarters of a vessel in the great fleet commanded by an Australian news magnate
of some note. In the grand scheme of the mainstream media J. Barrett Armstrong wasn’t so high up the totem pole, but in the grand scheme of the folks who signed Steve’s pay-checks he
was right at the top, Thunderbird-in-chief.

Right now, J. Barrett Armstrong’s office was crowded with managers and senior editors, all of whom were getting a piece of the proprietor’s ear as he vented his frustration.
‘The fucking war’s
over
,’ he shouted, wadding up a printout from the machine in the corner and throwing it at the wall. ‘Who did Ali get the bomb from? There’s
the fricking story!’ A bank of monitors on a stand showed the story unfolding in repeated silent flashbacks. ‘How did they smuggle them in? Go on, get digging!’

Nobody noticed Steve sneaking in until he tapped his boss, Riccardo Pirello, on the shoulder. Rick turned, distractedly: ‘What is it?’