He switched off the TV.
I shook my head. “You bastard. You’re going to kill him and blame it on me…”
He shrugged. “That is very much up to you and Marni. You have a lot of soul-searching to do over the next few hours.” He glanced at his watch. “I have arranged accommodation for you both in Chain Bridge Road, between Palisades and Wesley Heights. You’ll be very comfortable there. Gibbons will come with us to sleep off his mild intoxication.” He glanced at me. “He has very powerful friends, Lacklan, as I have mentioned to you before. They will not be pleased. All of his suspicions about you will have been confirmed.” He turned to Marni. “And I am afraid they’ll be wondering about you, too.” He sighed. “What becomes of him is up to you. What becomes of all three of you, is up to you. Despite what you think, we are not in the business of destroying people for the fun of it. We would much rather have the three of you onside. So please, spend this afternoon and tonight productively, and when we meet tomorrow, be prepared to tell us how you would change Omega if you could. Your lives, and Professor Gibbons’ life, depend on it.”
We had started to descend toward D.C. He reached in his pocket and pulled out an envelope, which he slid across the table to me.
“The address of your house and two sets of keys. You will be under surveillance, but you will not be controlled or stopped if you attempt to go away. You are not prisoners. All that will happen is that I will be informed. A car will come to collect you tomorrow at two PM, after lunch. If you don’t come to the meeting, Professor Gibbons will be executed.”
Twenty
Chain Bridge Road was not so much leafy as wooded, and not so much suburban as semi-rural. Our house was set back from the road, among plane trees and pines, with a crescent driveway to the front door. It was a big, stone affair, painted cream, with blue, gabled slate roofs and tall chimneypots that poked up among the trees toward a perfect blue sky.
Marni paid the driver while I unlocked the heavy, blue wooden door. Somewhere a rook, or it may have been a raven, cawed like he thought what I had done might have consequences. Bad ones.
I stepped in. It wasn’t super luxury, but it was spacious and comfortable in a pleasant, old world sort of way. There was a big hall with a broad, oak staircase that climbed to the upper floors. A dark, wooden door on the left led to a large living room with an red brick fireplace and the kind of cozy furniture you’d expect from a New England cottage. At the far end, there was a long dining table, and behind it French windows stood open onto a mature garden with stone steps leading down to a well-tended lawn, and a pond. The raven who had laughed at me was now strutting across that lawn, like he owned it.
There was a tray of drinks on a credenza, a couple of large, well stocked bookcases, and a smell of baking coming from somewhere. I turned to look at Marni, who had come in behind me. I smiled. “Welcome home.”
She gave a humorless snort. “You think it’s bugged?”
I raised an eyebrow. “You think it’s not?”
She shrugged. “You think they abducted Rosalia and Kenny too, and they have them baking in the kitchen?”
As if in response to her question, there was a tap at the door and an agreeable woman in her forties looked in and smiled. “Good afternoon, are you Mr. and Mrs. Walker?”
Marni gave a single shout of laughter and pointed at me. “He is Mr. Walker, I am Dr. Gilbert. Who are you?”
The woman looked startled. “Oh, I beg your pardon, Dr. Gilbert. I am Mrs. Henderson. I’m almost finished in the kitchen and I have done upstairs…” She hesitated. “According to the instructions I was sent…”
Marni smiled. “Sure, Mrs. Henderson. I didn’t mean to bark. That’s great, thank you.”
“Pie’s in the oven. It needs an hour. Can I get you anything before I go?”
We told her we’d be fine and watched her through the leaded bow window as she cycled away, along the wooded lane. When she’d disappeared from view, Marni turned to me and looked up into my face.
“Lacklan, they are insane. What is this? Tell me you think they’re insane as well.”
I nodded. “I do. I think they are out of their minds.”
“Cozy country house, French windows onto the lawn, Mrs. Henderson cooking us pies, and tactical nuclear bombs at the United Nations…” She shook her head. “Excuse me?”
I laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh, it was a bitter one. I dropped into one of the overstuffed armchairs and a wave of profound exhaustion washed over me. “You think they’re trying to make a point?”
She watched me from the window. “What point?”
“I don’t know. This represents their core values, the bomb represents what they are forced to do in order to achieve those values?”
“You buy that shit?”
I sighed. “No, Marni! I’m the guy who just nearly got vaporized diffusing the bomb, remember?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Lacklan, that was stupid.” She came and sat in the chair opposite me, then said, “No, I don’t think they are making a point. I think they are just insane.”
I shrugged. “Is it so different?”
“So different to what?”
“To what so-called legitimate governments do. They send men like me to Afghanistan and Iraq to hunt and kill human beings, they allow multinational corporations to devastate the rainforests, support child slavery, exploit African mines in states where twelve-year-old kids are taught how to behead people and use assault rifles. They allow banks like ITCD to launder the Sinaloa’s drug profits. And meanwhile, the men and women who make billions out of all this chaos and cruelty sip champagne in mansions, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single suit or dress, and shoot two hundred thousand dollar sports cars to Mars for fun.” I shrugged again. “I don’t think Omega is any more insane than our legitimate governments. I think Omega is just the distillation of everything that is our society. It is our society taken to its logical extreme. Are they any more insane than, say, the Third Reich, or North Korea? If anything, they are less extreme.”
She was frowning at me. “Are you apologizing for them?”
“Again, no. All I am saying is that, however offensive they may be—and to me they are very offensive—they are not as weird as they may appear. Human beings behave in very strange ways when they become extremely rich and powerful. Jesus! Look at the Bohemian Grove! The Pizza scandal, Wyss…” I spread my hands. “Need I go on?”
She sounded uneasy. “No, but what’s your point?”
“I don’t know, no real point, just that we shouldn’t see them as something freakish or abnormal. I think they represent the status quo.”
Now she looked unhappy and changed the subject. “What about this request of Ben’s, that we prepare a statement on how we would alter Omega?”
I sighed. “It’s pretty cynical.”
“They’re trying to lure us in, like your dad.”
I nodded. After a moment, I said, “His big regret, when he died, was that he allowed them to do that.”
Her gaze was lost in the garden behind me. The raven was still cawing. The smaller birds ignored him and chattered, like gossiping mothers in a storybook world where owls read books and bunnies make tea. She puffed out her cheeks and said, “I believe you. My only recommendation for how they could improve would be for them all to make like lemmings and jump.”
I gave a small laugh. “I don’t think that would be very helpful, somehow.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Helpful?”
“Marni, I can’t remember the last time I slept. I am more tired than I can describe. Please don’t jump down my throat every time I say something that isn’t perfectly expressed.”
She raised both hands. “My bad. You want to get some sleep.”
“I think I have to, but we need to give some very serious thought to what Ben has asked us to do. The implications if we do it, and if we don’t, need to be very carefully examined.”
She leaned forward, with her elbows on her
knees, and rubbed her face. “If we go there tomorrow and offer him a range of proposals aimed at how we think Omega could improve, that will do three things. One, it will be an acknowledgment that we believe Omega can improve to a point where we would consider joining it; two, it will allow them to appear to meet our requirements and entice us to join; and three, it will allow them to engage us in a dialogue, effectively a cease-fire. It will give them a beachhead and allow them to try to seduce us, drive a wedge between us… You name it!”
I held her eye while she was talking and gently, discreetly tapped my ear with one finger until I saw realization dawn on her face. She shrugged and spread her hands.
I said, “Of course you are right. But we need to examine both sides of the argument. That is probably their purpose in asking us to come up with these proposals, but what if we don’t? What happens if we don’t?”
She looked at the cold fireplace. “They’ll kill Philip.”
“Amongst other things. It will be confirmed that the man who killed him was in fact Captain Lacklan Walker, posing as Special Agent Harrison Mclean, whom he attempted to murder along with his partner, Special Agent Daren Jones. And every tiny piece of advantage that we gained today by exposing the bomb plot will be lost, because we will lose our only allies, the press and the cop on the beat.”
“So what do you propose?”
I discreetly tapped my ear again. “I don’t know, Marni. Give me a couple of hours to sleep. Then I’d like to see the news, see how the story is developing. Then…” I thought for a moment. “The Potomac is less than a mile to the west of here. There’s a nice walk through the woods. Let’s take that walk, relax a bit, and try and get a different perspective. What do you say?”
She nodded. She had understood what I was saying. “Sure, that makes sense.” She came over and knelt by my side. The kiss she gave me was as natural as though we had been together for the last ten years. She stroked my face and said, “I’ll wake you in a couple of hours.”
There were five bedrooms on the second floor, but only the master bedroom had been made up. It was ample, furnished in the same old-world style as the rest of the house, and had a large, bow window overlooking the garden. The others had the drapes drawn and the furniture covered in dustsheets. Clearly Ben, or his masters, whoever was pulling the strings in this deep game, wanted us to be a couple for some reason. I was too exhausted to think about it right then. I collapsed onto the huge bed, closed my eyes, and slipped quickly into a deep, dreamless sleep.
When I awoke, the light outside the window had acquired a coppery hue, and the shadows had grown longer and deeper. It was not evening, but the afternoon was thinking about moving that way.
I swung my legs off the bed and realized that my boots had been removed, and so had my jacket and my Sig. I smiled and made my way to the en suite where I stood for ten minutes under the hot jets of water, allowing some of my exhaustion and my confusion to be washed away.
Finally, I dressed and made my way downstairs. I found Marni in the kitchen. It was the only room in the house that had made any concessions to the twenty-first century. It was big and roomy and had a huge fridge and a breakfast bar with stools. That was where Marni was sitting, drinking coffee and watching the news on a TV across the room.
She looked at me as I came in, jerked her head at the screen, and said, “I’m not sure what to make of it.”
I went and rested my ass on the table. Jeff Glor was reading the news. He was saying, “…this report live from the UN Headquarters in New York.”
They cut to a guy I didn’t know, standing outside the gates of the UN building. Behind him, you could see police cars and unmarked vehicles in the plaza, but what was new was the two FBI vans and three Army National Guard trucks that were stationed there, and the soldiers in combat gear standing guard with assault rifles. The reporter was saying, “There is a sense of barely suppressed panic, Jeff. It’s as though the administration really does not know what part of this fiasco to deal with first. I am told the president is going to address the nation later this evening, but even that has not been confirmed, as far as I am aware.
“What we know now is that there was, indeed, an armed, nuclear device smuggled in through the security gates at the entrance to the building, right under their noses. It was concealed in a wheelchair and it was taken to the General Assembly Hall. We also know that the timer was in fact set to detonate at noon, just as Dr. Marni Gilbert and Professor Gibbons were due to start their talk.
“Critics of the government’s policy on the environment are clamoring for an explanation for how this could have happened. Some are even accusing the president of involvement in a plot to assassinate these two speakers who, it is understood, were going to make certain revelations about the role of multinational corporations and western governments in climate change and overpopulation. What those revelations were to be, Jeff, is not known precisely, but some are saying that they would have been damaging to the president and this administration, as well as previous ones.
“However, perhaps the most important question that investigators here are asking is, how did a U.S.-made nuclear device fall into the hands of terrorists?”
Glor’s voice interrupted him and the reporter pressed his ear piece into his ear to listen. “Is there any indication yet, Dave, as to exactly who these terrorists were? Has anybody claimed responsibility for the attempt?”
“No, Jeff, some people are pointing to a small demonstration of Islamic fundamentalists who were chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ at the security check a little earlier in the day. But the level of organization needed to set up an attack of this sort is huge, and sources within the FBI are also pointing to the fact that the chair was, apparently, brought into the building by three non-Muslims. Attempts are currently being made to trace those people.”
Glor’s voice interrupted again, “And, finally, Dave, what more, if anything, do we know about Professor Gibbons’ murder?”
“So far, Jeff, there is nothing new. There are unconfirmed reports that the man posing as Special Agent Mclean, the very man who apparently defused the atomic device, also gunned down Professor Gibbons before escaping. This of course raises all sort of questions, including, was Professor Gibbons himself responsible for the bomb? But so far, the FBI are playing their cards very close to their chest and have declined to comment.”
“And, before you go, Dave, I see there is now a military presence at the UN.”
“We don’t know exactly what their purpose is here, Jeff, they arrived about an hour ago and the entire complex seems now to be under military guard. Russian and Chinese delegates have quietly raised questions about jurisdiction, but so far it seems everybody is content to wait and see what the investigation unearths. The president is due to make a statement either tonight or tomorrow morning, so we hope to know more then.”
They cut back to the studio and Glor addressed the camera. “Now, the markets have responded badly to…”
I killed it and turned to face Marni. “Let’s take a walk and clear our heads. What do you say?”
She sat staring at the black screen for a while, then looked at me like she had only just registered my words. She nodded. “Yeah, good idea. We have at least a couple of hours of daylight. Let’s go.”
Across from the house, and running the length of Chain Bridge Road for almost a mile, was a stretch of wild wooded parkland. It was unfenced and untended, with a couple of foot paths that wound their way through the trees down to the river. We stepped out of the house, crossed the road, and entered the woodlands. As we went, I turned and looked back to see if anybody was following us, but we were alone, and pretty soon we were deep among the chaotic jumble of trees, fallen branches, creeping ivy, and wild ferns that is nature, when Man leaves her be. Dappled sun broke the shadows on the path ahead of us, above our heads wings battered the leaves sporadically among the canopy, and bursts of song seemed almost to sparkle against the clean blue of the sky.
Marni shoved
her hands in her jeans pockets and stared down at her boots as she walked, like she wanted to make sure she placed each step in just the right place. I knew from experience, you can’t do that and remain human. She said, “They know that we know the house is bugged.”
I shrugged. “Of course. But they also assumed that we would come here to discuss our plans. They’re not really interested in what we discuss. They’re only interested in our final decision. To be honest, Marni, as far as they are concerned, they have hooked us and they are reeling us in.” She flashed a look at me like she was about to get mad. I shook my head. “There is nothing to be gained by kidding ourselves. That is where we are. As soon as they caught you, the game changed.”
Her cheeks colored and she looked back at her boots. “Do I need to apologize?”
I smiled. “No, you need to focus.”
Voices came to us with that odd, dull amplification that sounds acquire in forests. A woman, a child shouting and laughing, and then a golden retriever streaking through the trees. A red sweatshirt chasing, calling. Three fleeting lives.
I took a deep breath. “They will want your father’s research.”
She nodded without looking at me. “I know. I have to choose, live with your death and Philip’s on my conscience, or hand over the research and give up the fight. It’s the choice your father faced, or the next stage of that choice.”
We had come to a clearing. The retriever was sniffing furiously, seeking in the tall, wild grass around a large tree stump and a fallen trunk. The child’s voice called from the shadows among the undergrowth and the dog bolted after her. Marni approached the felled tree and stepped onto the stump. She smiled down at me. Her face was sad. “I’m the queen of the castle,” she said. She waited, looking into my eyes, but I had no answer. “I used to be a little girl, once.”
“I remember, I was there. You were quite good at it.”
“But you were never a little boy. You were always serious and earnest. Even when you were fighting off dragons to protect me, you did it with a tremendous commitment, for such a skinny little runt.”
OMEGA SERIES BOX SET: Books 1-4 Page 73