Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (37 page)

           
So he knows.

           
Well, he would, wouldn’t he? And my
little lesson in
Connecticut
didn’t take, did it? But of course I should have realized that;
intimidation is a cumbersome tool, as likely to stiffen resolve as to break
spirit. Oddly enough, violence never
is
the answer. Things done in violence have to be done over again.

           
But what else is there, with as
fallen and shameless a creature as this nameless slave of the Unholy? Reason?
Persuasion? Argument? Emotional appeal? Bribery? He’s an extension of his
miserable master, nothing else, with no more free will than a moon.

           
All right, we’ll stop him. Again.

           
In order to accomplish anything,
this fetid fiend will have to take a corporeal form, which in his case of
course means possessing a human’s body rather than, as in mine, creating a
pleasing person out of air. And his first idea—they’re so predictable, so
obvious, these tools of Satan—will be to take over one of the hostages in the
plant, one of the staff members kept inside to run the machinery. But that’s
easily dealt with. I have my own assistants when necessary, my cherubim,
swifter than thought, darting through space and time with arrowed precision.
(How unthinking of human artists to portray them as fat!)

           
I have called upon them, these lean
servants of the Lord. They hover now over the hostages, protecting, observing,
prepared to alert me at the slightest hint of incursion. Until the end, each
hostage shall have one of these, these, oh, let’s call them guardian angels.

           
So he can’t suddenly, all at once,
be
there, inside the plant. He’ll have
to start from the other side of the fence, take over some poor human somewhere
out in the world, and try to scheme some way to move it through the maze of
officialdom ringing the site. Impossible? I’m not sure; that diseased cur does
seem to have a low cunning.

           
Outside, of course, his choice of
host is wide. I can’t give
everyone
a
guardian angel. We’ll simply have to keep a diligent watch.

           
These were the times that tried
Joshua Hardwick’s soul. To be public information director for a nuclear power
plant less than a hundred miles from a major population center like
New York City
was no bed of roses even when things were
going well. When the plant was under occupation by terrorists— nobody even knew
for sure
which
terrorists, just to
put the icing on the cake—the PID’s life became, in a word, hell.

           
There were even times these days
when he found himself thinking nostalgically of the advertising racket, that’s
how bad it was. (At least in the ad game, you could drink at lunch. And CNN
wasn’t training its cameras on you every time you blew your nose. And. . . Nah.
There’s no parenthesis big enough.)

           
Lately, Joshua hated to get out of
bed in the morning, hated that first pre-breakfast phone call to the command
post outside the Green Meadow gate—“Still there. No change.”—hated sitting in
his Honda for the twenty-minute bucolic (and so what?) drive from his once-happy
home in Connecticut to his once-cushy job. He hated the job, the reporters, the
cops, the questions, the answers, and the fact that there actually weren’t any
answers, not really

           
Possibly most of all—apart from the
terrorists who were ultimately responsible for this mess—Joshua hated his
bosses, and God knows there were enough of them for the hate to spread around.
Green Meadow was a quasi-govemmental, quasiprivate corporation, run by three
federal and two
New York
State
agencies, plus a consortium of private
companies led by Unitronic Laboratories, itself a subsidiary of Anglo Dutch
Oil. Every one of those entities had its representatives here for the crisis,
and the task of each and every one of those representatives, it had early
become clear, was to see to it that some other entity got the blame when things
ended badly.

           
That was kind of depressing already,
knowing they all
expected
it to end
badly And that, rather than any of them trying to do something to change that
gloomy prediction, they were all spending their time trying to scramble out of
the way of falling debris.
Expected
falling debris.

           
Which meant they
all
wanted the ear—and the voice, and
the heart, and the mind, and the soul—of the public information director. They
all wanted to believe he was on
their
side, would present
their
waffling
and cowardice in the best light while screwing everybody else. (The idea that
everybody else should be screwed was as important to these businessmen and
government officials as the idea that they themselves should be spared.)

           
As usual this morning Joshua had to
show his two separate IDs—one wasn’t enough for these people, because they were
very serious
—at the police barrier
half a mile down the road from the plant entrance, and as usual it was a state
trooper he never remembered seeing before, and who felt the same about him.
Sitting at the wheel of his Honda with controlled impatience during the
trooper’s long slow inspection of his face, Joshua felt a sudden startling
clench
in his stomach, a sudden urgent
need to throw up. “Oh, my God,” he said. “I can’t— You’ll have to—”

           
Startled, the trooper backed away,
hand whipping to his sidearm as Joshua came boiling out of the car, right hand
clamped over mouth. Joshua managed two steps toward the far verge, all his
muscles and joints lashing him with sudden excruciating pain, before he dropped
to his knees and burst breakfast all over the westbound lane and slightly on
his own trousers.

           
“Jesus Christ, fella!” the trooper
cried, no longer suspicious— nobody can fake that much vomit—‘What's the matter
with you?”

           
“I dun—I dunno.” Kneeling there,
head sagging, Joshua gasped, lungs searing with pain at every breath. He
dropped back to sit on his heels, arms hanging at his sides, and felt the pain
strike at him everywhere, as though a whole bag of cats at once were trying to
claw their way out of his body

           
“I’ll call somebody,” the trooper
decided.

           
“Wai—” Joshua said, vaguely lifting
an arm. ‘Wait.”

           
Because the pain, as quickly as it
had come over him, was now lessening, fading away. He was able to take deeper
and deeper breaths, he could feel his strength steadily return, and he lifted a
shaking hand to wipe his sweat-beaded and cold-feeling brow.

           
“What a hell of a thing,” he said,
his voice trembling. And now that the first attack was over, what he mosdy felt
was scared. What was this? Cancer? Leukemia? An early sign?

           
Oh, Christ, don’t tell me I got
something at the goddamn
plant.

           
“Wait there,” the trooper said,
which Joshua was more than willing to do, sitting back on his heels in front of
his breakfast like an extremely oddball worshipper, and the trooper went away
to his impressive official Plymouth Fury II on the other side of the road,
returning a minute later with a roll of paper towels and a Diet Pepsi. “Here
you go,” he said. “Try it, anyway.”

           
Grateful, Joshua wiped his face and
neck with the paper towels, then took a long swig of Diet Pepsi to clean out
his mouth. It landed in his stomach without incident, seeming content to stay
there, and Joshua struggled to his feet, the trooper giving him a hand.
‘Thanks,” Joshua said. “Boy, I don’t know what that was.”

           
“You better check with your doctor,”
the trooper told him.

           
“I will.”

           
“You’re looking awfully red-eyed.”

           
Terrific; a vampire for CNN. “I
don’t know,” Joshua said, leaning one hand on the top of the Honda. “Maybe I
ought to go home, call in. Maybe you could call in for me, the Press Office”

           
“Sure,” said the trooper.

           
But then Joshua felt a stiffening of
the spine—he actually felt it, a surge of toughness through his body—and he
stood up straighter, taking his hand off the Honda as he said, “No, never mind,
I’m all right now.”

           
“You sure?”

           
“Positive.”

           
Joshua got back behind the wheel,
and glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, and by God his eyes
were
red-rimmed, as though he’d spent
all last night in mad debauch. One of the secretaries would have Murine,
Visine, one of those eyedrop things. He couldn’t face a news camera like this;
he could barely face a
print
reporter
like this.

           
So why don’t I go home? he asked
himself, even as his body, following its own agenda, started the car, shifted
into gear, and waved “so long” to the trooper, who called, ‘Take care now.”

           
The last half mile between police
barrier and plant entrance was the most peaceful ride in the world. There were
no houses or farms along here, nothing but regrowth woods (containing shreds of
stone wall, the faint pencil marks of failed setdements) and overgrown fields,
not yet reclaimed by forest. The road was reasonably smooth and reasonably
straight, and he was alone on it, his Honda a magic carpet through a world
called Serenity. If only all of driving could be like this.

           
(The local newspaper’s main news
angle on the terrorist takeover at the nuclear plant was the fact of this road’s
being closed to normal traffic. They were editorially outraged, and brought out
all the usual heart-tuggers: school buses diverted onto dangerous truck-ravaged
highways, senior citizens facing an extra thirty agonized minutes to reach
their life-giving medicines, all of that. They came as close as they dared to
claiming that local dairy farmers’ milk was curdling on its so-much-longer way
to market, but if they followed that particular line much further the dairy
farmers would surely rise up as one and burn the newspaper offices to the
ground, so they were showing—some—restraint.)

           
Fortunately, the local weekly paper
was not that high on the list of Joshua’s media problems. He was distantly
polite to their chubby girl reporter, gave her the same handouts he gave
everybody else, and let it go at that. And enjoyed the half mile of sequestered
road. It was one of the few things in his life these days he could enjoy at
all.

           
By the time he got to the command
post—a series of trailers scattered like a Canadian mining town all over the
road in the vicinity of the main gate—Joshua’s recent illness was completely
gone, except for the red eyes. He left the Honda in its assigned space, walked
to the Press Office trailer, and a steno there did have eyedrops for him. She
paused in her endless work at the copying machine to root through her big
horse-feeder-bag purse and find the little bottle, which he took to the men’s
room and used on both eyes, to no effect. The red fringe was just
there,
in his eyes, as though behind
them his brain were on fire.

           
Out again in the bullpen, after
returning the eyedrops with thanks, Joshua was about to look at the thick stack
of message memos already making a leaning tower on his desk when the new Anglo
Dutch press rep introduced herself. “Hi, Karen Levine,” she said. She was thin,
early thirties, ash-blond hair, clear level eyes, no-nonsense manner, hard bony
handclasp. “I want you to know, from the get-go,” she said, “you’re the guy in
charge. I’m just here to help out if I can, if any questions come up involving
Anglo Dutch.”

           
“Thanks, Karen,” Joshua said, with
his brightest and falsest smile, knowing he would have no more than two weeks
of this one. “I appreciate all the help I can get,” he told her, as he told
them all. “Glad to have you aboard.”

           
The fact was, Anglo Dutch had
learned from Exxon’s experience with the
Valdez
.
Never keep your information officer around
long enough to establish any kind of personal rapport with the media; that way
indiscretions and uncomfortable leakage lie. Every two weeks, whip into the
slot another trim slim thirty-four-year-old, bland and smooth and bright, male
or female (makes no difference), who will give the company line a nearly human
face; but before that face becomes completely human get it out of there, and
start with a new one.

           
It had worked for Exxon in
Alaska
, and it was working for Anglo Dutch at
Green Meadow, and why not? Everybody likes to talk with a handsome person; so
what if they aren’t saying anything?

           
Something about the encounter with
A-D’s latest clone left Joshua too disheartened to look at his message
mountain.
^c
Tm going to walk the perimeter, Grace,” he told his
secretary, a fiftyish civil service employee in whom the milk of human kindness
had curdled long before the closing of any local roads.

           
She gave him a disapproving look. “What
should I say to callers?”

           
“Hello,” Joshua suggested, and left
the trailer.

           
The primary official presence was
centered here at what had been the main gate back when ingress and egress were
possibilities at Green Meadow, but guards of one sort or another, mosdy state
troopers and national guardsmen, were spotted all around the rim of what the
more military among them persisted in calling “the facility”; as though
anything about this were easy.

           
The citizen soldiers of the National
Guard—mosdy not the accountants and supermarket managers of song and story, but
unskilled laborers who were grateful for the extra money they got being
guardsmen (but not thrilled at having been called to active duty)—were
positioned back in the woods, in pairs and trios, within sight of every inch of
fence. Idiots of various kinds kept trying to climb that fence—younger
reporters, thrill-seekers, wannabe heroes, drunks (after dark), and jerks
generally—so it had to be watched. There was no point having a group of nervous
terrorists destroy themselves and several hundred thousand worthier people
simply because two dumb kids, for instance, were playing dare-ya.

           
Still, Joshua thought, as he walked
away from the command post along the fence, it would be nice to get in there.
Interesting. And almost his job, really, to know what was going on. Not that he
would try to be a hero, rescue anybody or stop anything that was going on at
the plant, nothing like that. Just observe.