by Barry Klemm
But Glen would not give in. He was so sure of himself. By then you would have got the impression that he was Project Earthshaker and Thyssen merely a figurehead. And Jami non-existent. Her name had not even been mentioned. But the truth, if it needed revealing, was made plain just an hour before when Thyssen brought her for the first time to the dungeon that was the headquarters of Project Earthshaker.
This really was a basement. Air ducts and water pipes snaked about beneath the ceiling everywhere and you could hear the pumps humming through the thin partitions. The stairs descended from ground level and ended at the car park, where a door marked Strictly No Entry admitted them to a steel stairway and they plunged down to the janitor’s quarters. Long corridors carried them away from the elevator (she was enjoying her knowledge of American idiom) and through dark places with exposed fluorescent lighting to the door of the office they inhabited.
There were five computer screens, each with their own seating spaces, but the chairs were a hotchpotch obviously scavenged. The file cabinets showed streaks of rust. Every bit of vertical space had printouts and notes and maps and photographs stuck on it, often tiers of over sticking. Each of the computers and all of the electrical equipment had been deprived of cabinets and from them disembowelled components clung to their function by bunches of wires. Heaped boxes of additional components littered the floor.
“What did you say our budget was?” Lorna asked when she saw it.
Thyssen smiled. “It all functions, and it’s away from prying eyes.”
“Unless you include the rats,” Lorna said with a shudder.
“Any rat that came in here would be electrocuted in thirty seconds,” Glen grinned. “So watch where you step.”
That idea stuck in Lorna’s mind and kept her rooted to the spot.
Thyssen introduced them—until then she had assumed Glen to be a technician’s apprentice.
“How we doing?”
“Sixty-nine percent on the Japan trench region.”
Thyssen grabbed handfuls of print-outs and shuffled through them and the two men spoke ten minutes of solid jargon, not one word of which Lorna understood. It made her realise just how much they simplified their thoughts for her benefit on other occasions.
“I hope you don’t expect me to remember any of this,” she interrupted at one stage.
Both looked at her in annoyance.
“You’re not supposed to remember any of it,” Thyssen said grimly.
“Then what am I doing here?”
Thyssen ran his eye around his domain. “I just thought you might like to see the throbbing heart of our operation.”
“Yes, I thought I might have too.”
“We’ll be finished in a few minutes,” Thyssen gruffed at her. “Why don’t you make us all coffee?”
The last hundred times some male had said that to her, they had been met with the most vehement refusal—this time it sounded like an excellent option. She looked around with a frown.
“You mean one of these contraptions makes coffee?”
“Over behind the door.”
She found a sink and a bench, stained beyond reason, and three jugs all with their electrical innards hanging out. One of them was plugged into a power point that was hanging from a hole in the wall, but the red light was on and she bravely made assumptions. There was a coffee plunger stained the colour of beer bottles and some mugs all suspiciously coffee coloured that she suspected might have originally been white. Into this lot, she was required to add the most expensive Brazilian coffee on the market. No one could accuse them of lacking class.
They sat on chairs amid the jumble of wiring and gadgets and Thyssen studied the monitor screen, Glen occasionally pointing things out, Lorna still looking for electromagnetic rodent ghosts.
“Yeah, I got it,” Thyssen finally said. “Now you two piss off for an hour and let me get into this.”
So they went, Lorna and Jami’s fantasy, to the cafe where he tried to chat her up at ten o’clock in the morning. But there was something occurring to her.
“What’s he doing? Right now, I mean?”
“Working out the final position.”
Lorna arched her eyebrows at the obvious contradiction. “I thought you did that?”
“No. I work up the models. This time, with the data from Tahiti, I’ve run 602 models and they all have slightly different answers. But most of them point to a region of about a thousand square kilometres. Harley then takes over and works out which is the right one.”
“How?”
Now that they had got down to scientific facts instead of seduction, he was able to be quite candid. “I don’t know. Theoretically, he can’t know any more about it than I do. But somehow he does.”
“Intuition?”
“Not the way he’d put it.”
“But is he guessing?”
“Only if he’s wrong.”
“But he was right last time.”
“He sure was. With the data I had, I was able to place it accurately within about a thousand miles. With the same data, he was able to place it within a hundred.”
“Which is why he’s the boss and you’re a humble student?”
“That’s it exactly.”
Lorna thought about it. There was only one possible answer. “He must know something that you don’t know.”
“No. You’re missing the point, Lorna. He knows everything that I don’t know.”
Then Thyssen was there. He walked up to the table in a great hurry, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
“It’s all set for you, sonny. You got two hours to prove me wrong.”
“You know I can’t,” Glen grumbled.
He rose from the table and left.
“Right, lassie. Our cab awaits.”
“The big announcement?”
“That’s right.”
“Whose turn this time?”
“NBC.”
He handed her a slip of paper. On it he had written ‘38 north 140 west’- longitude and latitude.
“Where’s that?” Lorna asked.
“Right smack in the middle of Honshu, which is the main island of Japan. This is gonna make Italy look like a marshmallow roast.”
*
By the time the pilgrims had been loaded on the ship—which had come around the peninsula to meet them at Piraeus—Kevin Wagner and Brian Carrick were there to see them off.
“By the way,” Brian said, “I got a message from Joe.”
Wagner hoped that he knew what it would be about. They were standing on the wharf watching the ship sail, two men both a long way from home.
“A fourteen million dollar message,” Brian elaborated with an inscrutable smile.
Wagner hated it. He was being played with. “Why did the message go to you?” he demanded.
“Because Joe wanted someone to check it out and see if you plan to spend the project’s money wisely.”
“How would you know what was wise and what wasn’t?”
“I wouldn’t. I just report back to Joe and presumably to Thyssen. They make the decisions. I’m just their eyes and ears.”
“I’d rather wait until Thyssen gets here.”
“He won’t be here. He’s gone to Washington to chat with the President.”
“It’ll wait until he gets back,” Wagner persisted. He truly did not want Brian Carrick or anyone else prying into his affairs.
“No it won’t,” Brian grinned. “That was the other part of the message. Report back by Wednesday.”
“Why Wednesday?”
“Joe, like Thyssen and that other bloke, moves in mysterious ways. But aren’t you, like me, just a little surprised that such funds might be available?”
“Nothing surprises me anymore,” Wagner sighed.
Left little alternative, Wagner decided that he ought to explain. He suspected that the time limit was a real one, and anyway, Joe Solomon was not the type to panic nor make jokes. He hated the idea of Brian checking up on him
, but it might have been worse. In fact, when he thought about it, he realised almost anyone else might be worse.
“We need a base,” Wagner said flatly.
“Do we? I thought we were based in Melbourne.”
“Not suitable. Too far away.”
“How can it be too far away from anywhere, when we are dealing with random global events. Everywhere is too far away in those circumstances.”
“We need our own airfield, and a place to house the pilgrims. And somewhere to set up a nerve centre for our operations.”
“It all sounds disgustingly military to me, Kev.”
Wagner could shrug that off. The idea, he knew, was to keep it as simple as possible. “It happens that our needs for the present and those for the foreseeable future can be met immediately, if we move quickly enough. I’m talking about the existing arrangements in Italy. The convent which can continue to be used as a hospital, the village, the damaged area, the airstrip the Americans built there and their facilities. Everything we need and if we don’t claim it immediately it will be broken up and redistributed. You understand?”
“You want to buy the whole lot up.”
“Sure I do. Of course, the locals can stay to keep the infrastructure running—they’ll just have a new landlord—us.”
“Sounds like a hell of a complicated thing to do.”
“It is, unless you know the right people. It happens I have an acquaintance who can arrange it all for us, immediately. He owns a great part of it already, and has good relations with the other owners.”
“I though the Catholic Church still owned the monastery?”
“They do. But my friend can arrange for us to make use of it as we presently do, and keep the nun’s running the place otherwise. It’s a very good deal.”
“A snap for a mere fourteen million.”
“That’s the deal. And Joe knows that. I don’t know why he is hesitating.”
“I do,” Brian said quietly. “I can understand why we need the hospital and the airstrip. I don’t understand about the other military facility.”
They stood on the dock the day before, two men with their hands in their pockets, looking around, standing just a little further apart than might have been expected. Wagner directed his gaze toward the departing ship as he spoke.
“What I need is a base, to train and house my security people,” Wagner explained.
“It’ll do that all right,” Brian said, also squinting off into the distance. “You could base the Red Army there.”
“Before long, I believe I can expect a couple of hundred personnel seconded from the US Navy.”
“Somehow I can’t see the US Navy giving them up so easily.”
“I think they won’t have any choice. In any case, Thyssen said to prepare for a steadily expanding force. They need to be trained and to keep their training up. And they need a base somewhere nice and central to everywhere.”
“Fine,” Brian agreed. “Although I’m still having some trouble with the idea of being central to a global event.”
“Central to the largest population centres, where, presumably, the greatest need for security will be required.”
“And we house all stray sleepers in the local hotels, right?”
“Sure. And we can add prefab housing for greater numbers at will.”
“And all for a mere fourteen million.”
“A fantastic bargain, Brian.”
“Fantastic is right.”
“Come on, Carrick. Look beyond the end of your nose.”
“Keep your shirt on, Kev. I can see certain advantages in the situation, assuming the project escalates.”
“It will.”
“It might. There are no certainties.”
“Give the idea a chance, sport.”
“Haven’t you noticed how I’m not laughing. This character you’re doing deals with. He’s the local Mafia don, isn’t he.”
“Something like that.”
“You sure that’s the sort of folk we ought to be doing deals with, Kev? They have a very extreme way of closing deals in their favour.”
“All the more reason why we use the money to buy them out of it completely.”
“Deals with the devil, Kev. They never come out the way you plan.”
Wagner groaned. There plainly wasn’t anywhere to go in this direction. Brian Carrick could be so damned stubborn. Why couldn’t he see how this mattered?
“All right, Brian. So tell me. What do you suggest?”
“Wait and see what happens.”
“It’ll be too late then.”
“Too late for what?”
“Can’t you see how we need to be organised. This thing is starting to get right out of hand.”
“I’ll say it is.”
“And that’s what you’re going to tell Joe?”
“Nar, I’ll keep my opinions to myself. I’ll tell him it’s a bargain. But it doesn’t matter much what I say because you aren’t going to get this sort of money anyhow.”
“Sooner or later, something like this is going to need to be done.”
“Then let’s do it later, and only when it’s necessary.”
“Not much on forward planning, are you Brian?”
“Do you really believe you can plan something like this? You got no idea what’s going to happen next.”
But neither did Brian Carrick, because as it happened, Joe Solomon provided the funds and Wagner got his base.
*
The Oval Office was a masterful illusion for it drew the eyes inward from both sides to the man behind the desk at the middle. Not that Eugene Grayson needed such assistance—he was a startlingly charismatic man, boyishly handsome, tall and elegant of movement, his black skin like polished mahogany. No man in history had travelled further from slavery than he, and yet neither did any man more closely resemble Jack Kennedy, despite the difference in skin coloration. He was living proof of the ignorance of racial discrimination, both in his appearance and the screams of betrayal from the rioting Afro-Americans in the southern states.
President Grayson rose from behind the chair and walked around the desk with a huge smile and an extended hand of welcome. Thyssen wondered if he knew the circumstances under which his visitor had arrived, politely arrested by a team of FBI agents, body searched and interviewed in a fashion that seemed mostly intended assure him that he was vulnerable to serious unspecified charges and test his views on patriotism. They were plainly none too happy with what they heard, even though Thyssen tried to co-operate and reassure them of his good intentions. He had guessed where it was all leading. When he saw that Lorna Simmons did not appear on the evening news as anticipated, he knew he could expect rather more than a reprimand from the Board of Governors. There weren’t many people in the country with the power to persuade NBC to pull a news segment for which they had paid an exorbitant sum for exclusive rights.
But Eugene Grayson, consummate political animal, could don his campaign smile and still manage the last of two hundred handshakes that day.
“Professor Thyssen, you don’t know what an honour it is to meet you at last. Come, sit here. I hope you are not inconvenienced by the late hour.”
Thyssen’s brain all but failed him. In the first place, he had no idea what time it might have been. The pretence by Grayson was so overwhelming that Thyssen was unable to believe that he must have known the circumstances of his visitor’s arrival. He wanted to say the most cynical and hurtful thing possible but all he could think of was to say `I didn’t vote for you’ which would not only have been childish but ridiculous since Thyssen had never voted for any politician in his life. He could only remain silent and shuffle into the chair. His body absorbed the comfort desperately.
Grayson remained standing, continued smiling, and walked away from the desk to stand by the window in a classic presidential pose.
“It’s a beautiful night, Professor. Don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Thyssen replied
. “I spent most of it in your basement.”
The President turned from the window to eye him coldly. All trace of the friendly smile was gone now, just when kindness entered his tone of voice.
“Now Professor, you must not be hostile. We have important matters to discuss and I hope we can do so in an amicable manner.”
“Do you have any idea what’s happened to me tonight?”
At this, Eugene Grayson was able to laugh. Perhaps he was not so far from the cruelties of slavery as Thyssen had imagined.
“I’m sure you understand that certain precautions and procedures must be followed before an interview with the President can be granted.”
“I don’t remember requesting any such interview.”
“You have a reputation as a very dangerous man, Professor.”
“I’m a sedentary academic nudging sixty. I shudder to think what my blood pressure is right now.”
Grayson advanced to Thyssen’s side of the desk and leaned on it. Thyssen could have head butted him in the balls if he’d had the strength.
“I’m sorry. It was my idea that I talk to you alone. Those people responsible for my safety insisted on certain precautions. But I’m sure you understand that already.”
It was true. He understood it only too well. He even began to feel pathetic, as if he was protesting too much. Feeling guilty about being mistreated? The verbal manipulative skill of this man was awesome.
“It’s odd you’d want to talk to a man you’ve gone to so much trouble to muzzle.”
“Not a lot of trouble really,” Grayson said as he drifted back behind the desk and sat, leaning on his forearms, hands clasped before him, ready to be reasonable. “Surely you can see how we cannot allow an individual like yourself to make such far-reaching announcements unhindered.”
“I’m just telling them what’s going to happen. That’s my job.”
“No, Professor, it is not. Your job is to gather data and draw conclusions and pass your recommendations on to the relevant authorities. Our job is to decide who tells who what.”