True Path

by Graham Storrs

  Polanski nodded. He looked again at the papers from his desk and put a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “I need a dozen good men. Go round ’em up for me. We’re doing a job tonight. Is the big dining room still usable?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell them I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “You haven’t told anybody, have you?” Jay asked when he was alone again with Polanski. “You haven’t told them you’re planning a deep splash that will destroy the whole city.”

  Polanski was very still. “I can’t. They’d want to evacuate their friends and families. Word would spread. There would be a panic. The Feds would find out. I can’t risk it.”

  “What the hell makes you think you’re any better than the people you’re fighting? From here I can’t see any difference at all.”

  Polanski raised his head and looked at Jay and his eyes were black pits. “There is none. You’re right. Theology, ideology, it’s all just fancy dressing on top of the ugly blackness in men’s souls. I want freedom and peace for my people. I want to abolish fear in this nation and restore dignity. I want a government of the people, by the people, for the people. But it’s not going to happen unless a lot of people die tomorrow. And, whatever happens afterwards, no-one is going to forgive me for what I did. But that’s OK. Let me be the villain. Let me be the monster they write about in the history books. That’s OK. Someone’s got to blow that dam and set the river of history moving in a new direction. Someone has to take that on his conscience, and I don’t see anyone else stepping up to the plate.”

  He opened a drawer and pulled out some rags. He balled up one and pushed it in Jay’s mouth, tying it in place with another. Then he grabbed up the papers from his desk and left, locking the door behind him.

  The filthy rag in his mouth made Jay want to vomit but that wasn’t what bothered him most. He had to get free and get away, get help, and get back before the morning. Polanski was clearly hell-bent on martyrdom, a martyrdom that would finish off all of Washington DC—

  Sandra, Cara and himself included.

  -oOo-

  Sandra drove with O‘Dell through the dilapidated streets of the capital. His limo had a human driver. “I’ve heard the Feds can commandeer robot cars and make them drive you straight to the DC Jail if they want to,” he told her.

  She hadn’t yet got a straight answer out of him as to why he was part of the Friends of Democracy Society. “Democracy’s good for business,” he said the first time she asked. Then, “What? Just ’cause I’m a crook, I can’t be a patriot?” Finally, he said, “I’d rather those creeps got to be the Government one day than Holier-Than-Thou-Polanski. Those guys I can work with.”

  “OK, here’s the deal,” she told him as he sipped a double malt and ogled her in the back of the car. “I’ll tell you everything that Polanski is planning if you help me get my daughter away from Duvalle.”

  He’d almost laughed his hat off. Sandra had to wait silently for him to settle down again. “Trust me, you want to know what Polanski is up to. It affects you and your business interests directly.”

  “Yeah? So why don’t I just get some guys to make you talk? Then I don’t have to do nothing.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Why don’t I just stick a gun in your face and make you help me?”

  He’d laughed at that one too. “You should go take a look at Duvalle’s place. It’s like a fucking fortress. If you can tell me how to get in, maybe I’ll consider if it’s in my interests to go up against one of the most powerful assholes in the country.”

  So they drove across town as night fell, heading northwest to where the one percent lived in big houses that were well spaced, with iron gates set into high walls. As they crawled past, Sandra glimpsed a brightly-lit mansion beyond smooth lawns. She also saw something about the size of a dustbin on wheels rolling along the drive—probably an automated sentry, the kind of little killing machine that would pack several lethal and non-lethal weapons and would patrol the grounds tirelessly all night. What she didn’t see were the other kill-bots, the multi-spectrum cameras, the human guards, or the dogs, but she was sure they would all be there. O‘Dell was right. The place was a fortress. Only a madman would attack it without a small army.

  “Maybe I could sneak in,” she said, thinking aloud.

  “Yeah? Good luck with that.”

  “I’d need a diversion.”

  “You’d need a tank.”

  “Have you got one?”

  “Nope. Oh, wait a minute.” He patted his pockets. “No. No. I must have left it at home.”

  “Well, what do you suggest?”

  He shrugged. “Why don’t you and me go have a nice meal and talk it over. I know a great place, good food, good wine … We could get to know each other, chill a little, mellow out. Afterwards, go back to my place, put on some music … Who knows?”

  “Right. But seriously, what kind of diversion can you provide?”

  He grinned. “You don’t find me diverting?”

  “Yes, like a mosquito. I keep wanting to squish you against the window. Look, you don’t even have to put your men at risk. Just set up something like a few little explosions. Give me a remote detonator, I’ll do the rest.”

  “So, tell me what Saint Polanski has planned, ’cause, you know, if I wait till after Duvalle’s buried your bullet-riddled corpse, I might never find out.”

  “When the diversion’s all set up and I’m ready to go in. Then I’ll tell you. Not before.”

  “A few explosives and a remote detonator. That’s all you want?”

  “That’s all. No problem for a man of your resources, I’m sure. And another drive around the neighborhood, just so I’m not going in totally blind.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Knock yourself out.” He gave the driver the instruction, leaned back in his seat, and took another sip of his whiskey. “You know, I’ve got an establishment on M Street. Nice, up-market kind of set-up, clean girls, top-drawer clientèle. I could use a classy dame like you to run the place, someone with balls, if you know what I mean. What do you say?”

  She smiled, amused despite herself. “I say that’s about as interesting as your last proposition—the one with the wine and the mellowing. Now listen, this is what I’m going to need for tonight.”

  -oOo-

  Polanski stood in a room adjoining the lob site that Sandra had not seen. It had survived the backwash quite well and was now repaired and secure once more. In it were three transparent plastic spheres, each a couple of meters in diameter. They looked for all the world like giant beach balls, constructed from multiple plastic sheets, laid over a flimsy wire frame and glued together. Little plastic legs stopped them from rolling around. Inside each was a cylindrical, padded seat, stuck to the bottom of the sphere, and each had an oval hatch cut into its side—a piece of clear plastic, on plastic hinges, with a black rubber seal. Of the three spheres, one was crushed and had a gash in its side where a roof strut had fallen onto it.

  “But the other two are OK?” Polanski asked, going over to inspect them.

  “They’re both fine,” said Michael. “We could fix up the other one if you like. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  Polanski shook his head. “I only need one.”

  He pushed the hatch on the closest sphere and it swung inwards. There was no catch and no handle. The design was optimized for keeping the sphere’s weight to a minimum. There was a vent in the side of the padded seat with a colored ribbon tied to its grille. “You’ve tested them?”

  “Yeah, don’t worry. Air, heating, CO2 scrubber, they’re all working in both bubbles. There’s an hour and twenty minutes’ supply of each. More than enough to get the job done.”

  Polanski stared at the bubble for a long time. It was a scarily flimsy contraption to risk his life in. Yet the people who built it for him swore it would hold together. The plastics, the glues, the door seal, they would all withstand the pressure and the temperature. He’d asked them for a kind of bathysphere, i
magining an impregnable steel shell, and they’d given him this. Lighter by far than the old spacesuits they had been using, the bubble could carry a man safely through the void to times as yet unreached by human travelers.

  “And the weapon?”

  Matthew squirmed and looked uneasy. “It’s in the safe.” He pointed to a big, old-fashioned iron safe. Only he and Polanski knew the combination. “You don’t want me to open it, do you? We’ve put the real shell in there now and that thing gives me the creeps.”

  “I’ll get it out when the time comes. The trials went well, I hear.”

  “Yeah, no problem. Dispersal over half a square mile. Pretty good accuracy for something that’s basically a spud gun.”

  “And how is the shell?”

  Again, Matthew squirmed. “It’s fine. I’ll be bloody glad when we’re all well away from it. Imagine if that backwash had damaged it. Peter opened the safe to check, you know, not me. I was too scared to do it.”

  Polanski put a hand on Matthew’s shoulder. “We all do what we’re able to. None of us can do more. Come on, let’s take a look at the rig.”

  He pushed back a sliding partition, big enough to roll one of the spheres through, and they walked over to where the lob site was being rebuilt. There was debris all around that no-one had cleaned up yet. The old roof boards and timbers had been roughly pushed aside along with the smashed computers and other rubbish. It hadn’t been a big backwash, obviously.

  “I suppose she just went back to yesterday and shot her past self,” Matthew said. “Big anomaly but so recent it didn’t disrupt things much. To do real damage, you’ve got to go a long way back. Then things have exponentially spreading ramifications.”

  Polanski glanced at Matthew. The teknik knew that Polanski knew all this. Yet the man was babbling away as if he were running a tour of the facility. He let it go for the moment.

  “Will it be ready in, say, twelve hours?” he asked.

  Matthew nodded. “You know, we might not even have to get that crazy bitch back. Just the few improvements she made while she was here made the targeting miles better.”

  “We can’t afford to miss.”

  “I know, but it’s not like you need to be very accurate.”

  “I get twelve minutes at the other end, right? So I need to be able to find a firing point in three minutes. The terrain back then could be slow going and the weapon is heavy, even the disassembled parts are heavy. I probably need to find somewhere within a hundred yards. The best time I ever made assembling it is eight minutes. Will the software improvements keep me from drifting more than, say, a hundred yards over the range of this lob?”

  The teknik chewed his lip. “They might.”

  “Might isn’t good enough. You know that. We only get one shot at this.”

  Matthew nodded and looked around. “We were lucky she didn’t do more damage. She could have, easily. It’s like she didn’t want to hurt anybody. Can you believe that? And it’s hard to control a splash. Did I tell you she went back without a suit? Zero pressure, zero Kelvin, worse than interstellar space for crying out loud. I can’t believe she did that.”

  “What’s bugging you, Matthew?”

  “What?”

  “There’s something on your mind. Let’s hear it.”

  The teknik looked hunted, as if Polanski had used some trick to get inside his head and expose him. He looked around at the people working on the rig and drew Polanski aside so no-one could hear them.

  “You’re doing the lob in twelve hours?”

  Polanski said nothing.

  “The thing is, I think I might be the only other person except you who knows how big a splash you’re planning. The rest, they just know something big and bad is happening. They know there’s about an hour from the start of the lob till the backwash hits us. They think an hour is plenty of time to get clear. I hear them talking. They’re moving out to stay with friends in the area. Some are talking about going up to Fort Reno Park to get a good view of the event. But it’s going to be worse than they imagine, isn’t it? It’s going to be worse than anyone can imagine. You can walk four miles in an hour, if you’ve got a clear road, but to get away from the splash you’re planning, they’d need to be at least ten miles out, probably fifteen. A fit man on a bike could maybe get clear, but not the women and the children.”

  “You’ve known about the parameters of the lob for a long time now,” Polanski said.

  “And I’ve been waiting all day for you to give the order to evacuate.” Matthew grew more agitated, more nervous. His voice took on a pleading tone. “If we told people to start moving now, they could get clear, no problem. They could catch buses or trains, get to another town.”

  Polanski kept his expression under control despite the turmoil inside. “No. I can’t risk it. If I evacuate all these people, word will spread. The trains will be packed, the roads will be filled. The Government will notice. I can’t leave them any chance to stop me.”

  He could see the confusion in his teknik’s face as Matthew tried to marshal an argument against murdering all his friends. The teknik tried to speak several times and stopped himself. Slowly, his silent confusion turned to horror. Polanski saw it and quailed. What he saw in Matthew’s eyes was what everyone would be feeling soon when they heard what Polanski had done.

  “Matthew, it has to be this way. You’re a smart guy, work it out.”

  “But I don’t want to go down in some fucking blaze of glory. You think I’m going to stand there and push the button that brings the apocalypse down on my own head?”

  “It’s all right, Matthew. I’ve made preparations.” He called for Peter to join them. The young man’s solid presence make Matthew look unusually skinny and feeble. “OK, Matthew. I need you to be there to run the lob. Peter, I need you to keep an eye on Matthew and to make sure he does his job. Don’t let him out of your sight and don’t let him talk to anyone about anything except the work. If he gives you any trouble, break another one of his ribs. If that doesn’t work, break his legs.”

  “What the fuck?” Matthew cast about as if he were about to bolt for freedom. Polanski had seen men scared before and this one was on the cusp of blind panic.

  “When you see me safely lobbed,” Polanski went on, talking now to Peter, “show Matthew to the car and take him with you to Philadelphia to join our people there. After that, he’s free to do what he likes.”

  Matthew’s breathing was still shallow, but the wildness was fading from his eyes. “A car?” he said. “I don’t know. Can we be clear in time, even in a car?” His brow creased as he did the sums. He nodded to himself. “Yeah, maybe. Probably.” He nodded again.

  “It’s the only offer you’ll get,” Polanski told him. “Can I count on you to do the job now?”

  The teknik stammered in his readiness to accede. “Of course. Yes. Of course.”

  Polanski turned to Peter. “Don’t let me down. Get him to Philly as fast as you safely can.”

  Peter assured him he would and Polanski left them feeling worse than ever. No matter how much he told himself there was no-one he could rely on more than Peter, he knew that he had just committed another act of monstrosity: selfishly saving his friend and protégé while leaving the rest to die. The burden of guilt was like a weight in his chest. This act alone might be enough to drag him down and down.

  -oOo-

  Sandra took advantage of the time O‘Dell needed to set up his diversion to reconnoiter the grounds of Duvalle’s house. She slipped quietly through neighboring properties, climbed up trees and walls. By the time O‘Dell returned, she knew just where to tell his men to place their charges.

  She climbed into the back of his limo. “You brought the stuff I asked for?”

  “On the seat there.”

  She grabbed the bag and pulled it towards her. It was gratifyingly heavy.

  “Before you open it …” he said and she turned to see what he wanted. He had a nine millimeter Glock in his hand, pointing straigh
t at her. The gun looked very large in his little hand but its barrel did not waver.

  “What’s this?” She was already weighing the odds of disarming him and pistol whipping the little bastard. They weren’t good.

  “It’s just that, you know, I don’t really know you very well yet, and there’s some serious hardware in that bag. This is just so it don’t give you no funny ideas when you get your hands on it.”

  She relaxed. Not perfidy but paranoia. “Yeah, whatever,” she said and rummaged in the bag. There was a snub-nosed sub-machine gun—some model she’d never seen before, but it looked pretty standard—four spare clips, a handful of grenades, a hunting knife, a Glock like the one O‘Dell was holding, spare clips for that too, and a shoulder holster. At the bottom of the bag was a garrote. All present and correct. There was also a bundle of clothing. She pulled it out onto the seat and examined it. “Perfect,” she said, flashing O‘Dell a grin. She started taking off her dress.

  “Hey, whoa!” O‘Dell seemed genuinely shocked. “Don’t you want to go behind a bush or something?”

  “It’s freezing out there. If the sight of my body offends your delicate sensitivities, why don’t you go behind a bush?”

  He cleared his throat, looking embarrassed by his own reaction. “Yeah, well, if it’s OK with you, I sure ain’t gonna complain.”

  She stripped off the dress and the voluminous petticoat, and replaced them with the men’s trousers and the black turtleneck O‘Dell had brought. He’d packed some workman’s boots, too, and she swapped those for her round-toed shoes. The fit was pretty good. She beamed at the little gangster and said, “That’s better.”

  He gave a nervous giggle, his face flushed. “I thought you’d look like a guy in that outfit but you definitely do not.”

  Sandra had heard clumsier compliments. “Where will you be when I get out with Cara?”

  He snapped back to business. “I’ll be across town in a bar among plenty of witnesses. That’s where I’ll be. I’ll leave a guy with a van, right here to pick you up. He’ll take you to somewhere we can talk.” She nodded. It would do. “And this dope you got on Polanski better be good. That hardware’s worth a lot of money.”