by Allen Steele
How he had managed to get it away from the blueshirt seated across from him, I’m still not sure. Perhaps he’d been watching the soldier from the corner of his eye while only pretending to look at the island, waiting for the blueshirt to relax his guard just long enough so that he could make a grab for his weapon. Or perhaps the soldier himself was at fault; he later told me that he’d been looking at Manuelito when Laird snatched the rifle from his hands. Whatever the reason, though, it happened fast enough that no one had time to react. One second, Laird was sitting quietly between the blueshirts. The next, he was standing up in the boat, the gun cradled in his arms, its barrel aimed at the startled soldiers.
“Joe…” Chief Stanley stared at him in horror. “Joe, settle down. Just take it easy.”
He ignored her. The soldier who’d been deprived of his gun started to move toward him, but Laird quickly took two deft steps back, putting himself most of the way to the prow of the boat so that he could cover us all.
From where he stood, I realized, he easily could shoot everyone aboard. He must have realized this, too, because when the lighthouse beam fell across the boat again, I caught a glimpse of his face and saw a cunning expression that I could only imagine had been there the day he’d delivered the suitcase bomb he’d made for Alberto Cosenza. Joe Ross was gone, and David Laird had returned.
“Don’t do it,” I said, fighting the urge to try to tackle him. He was too far away for me to do so before he put a fléchette in my chest.
“Joe, stop it,” Emma said. “Please…just stop.”
The lighthouse beam disappeared from his face, but I could still see him against the backglow of the boat’s floodlight. His gaze shifted toward me and Chief Stanley, and as it did, it seemed as if there was an instant in which two men were fighting for control of one man’s soul.
“I’m sorry.” When he spoke, his voice was little more than a dry croak. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “Tell Amy and Erin that I love them.”
And then he turned around and, without another word, leaped over the side of the boat.
“Joe, no!” Stanley screamed.
A loud splash, then he was gone. Weighed down by the gun and his heavy clothes, he vanished beneath the black and icy waters, leaving behind only a brief spurt of bubbles that disappeared as soon as the lighthouse beam touched them.
His body was never found. We could only assume that it was caught by the undertow of the Providence Straits and washed downstream to the Great Equatorial River, never to be seen again. But I knew that it wasn’t David Laird who died that night, but Joe Ross.
In the end, he’d found a way of reconciling himself with the sins of his past, in accordance with the Fifth Codicil of the Sa’Tong-tas.
Part 7
TERRA CONCORDE
Feeling the bump of the Mercator’s wheels settling upon concrete, Jorge looked away from the cockpit windows to watch Vargas as he throttled down the landing thrusters. The pilot reached forward to shut off the jets; the engines slowly died, and he turned to Jorge.
“Well…here we are,” he said.
“And where is that, exactly?” Again, Jorge peered out the windows. The sun was still coming up, but this time there wasn’t a dense fog to hide their surroundings. The shuttle had touched down on what appeared to be a rural airstrip outside a small town. Past a row of hangars was a recently harvested farm field, its dark brown soil covered by fallen cornstalks, a barn and grain silo not far away.
“Amherst.” Vargas finished switching off the control panels, then began to unbuckle his seat harness. “End of the road, such as it is.”
Jorge waited for Vargas to explain further. When he didn’t, he scowled at him. “You’re still not going to tell me what’s going on, are you?”
It had been about a half hour since the Mercator had lifted off from Beacon Hill. During the short flight from Boston, Jorge had seen little more than hills, rivers, small towns, and an abandoned four-lane highway. Vargas had maintained a cryptic silence the entire time, giving only monosyllabic responses to Jorge’s questions as he flew the shuttle westward across Massachusetts.
“I could,” Vargas replied, “but I think you ought to get it from someone else.” A reflective pause. “Considering all we’ve been through, you probably wouldn’t believe me. Better that you—”
“Will you open the damn hatch?” From the back of the shuttle, McAlister’s voice was an irate demand for attention. “And who the hell said you can fly my ship?”
Vargas rolled his eyes, smiled slightly. “Not exactly grateful, is he?”
Jorge wasn’t amused. “I think we’d all be a little more grateful if we knew why you—”
“Later.” Vargas rose from the left seat, stepped over the center console. “Just be patient,” he added as he headed for the passenger compartment. “You’ll learn the answers soon enough.”
Jorge unclasped his harness, followed Vargas from the cockpit. One of the Shadows was already unsealing the belly hatch; he lowered the ladder, then turned to assist Inez in helping McAlister out of his seat. The pilot winced and swore as the two of them carried him down the ladder; the indignity of having to be helped off his own ship didn’t improve his foul mood, and the sight of Vargas emerging from the cockpit hadn’t made him any less cranky.
Two small, three-wheeled vans were waiting at the edge of the airstrip. Vargas raised a hand to their drivers, and the vans approached the shuttle, their electric motors emitting no more than a soft whine. One of the vans was marked with a red cross; it came to a halt, and a young woman in a white tunic climbed out of the rear, carrying a collapsible stretcher under her arm. She unfolded it on the ground, then she helped the Shadow carefully place McAlister on it.
“There’s a hospital in town where we can take care of him,” Vargas said, as McAlister was lifted into the ambulance. “You’ll see him again soon, I promise.”
“I think I remember Black saying the same thing,” Jorge murmured.
Vargas gave him a sidelong look. “We’re not the Provos. Trust me, you’re among friends.”
Jorge said nothing. Vargas might have rescued them, but lacking any explanation, Jorge wasn’t inclined to trust him any more than he had before. Yet when Inez turned toward them, he noticed that she seemed relaxed. She walked over to Jorge, and he was surprised when she took his hand.
“It’s all right,” she said quietly. “We’ll be okay.” A glance at Vargas. “He’s…different now. Something about him has changed.”
Jorge wanted to ask what she’d sensed but refrained from doing so. The ambulance purred away, and the other van moved in to take its place. “C’mon,” Vargas said, holding open the rear passenger door for them. “There’s someone I think you’ll want to meet.”
Without hesitation, Inez climbed into the rear seat. Jorge followed her, and Vargas shut the door behind them before taking a seat beside the driver. The van sped away from the Mercator, its wheels bumping ever so slightly against the battered concrete. Its broad windows gave them a good view of where it was going. Once the vehicle reached the end of the airfield’s narrow dirt road, it turned left onto a paved road that led toward town. Just ahead was the ambulance, red lights on its roof silently flashing.
“Amherst got through the hard times a lot better than most other towns,” Vargas said, as they passed farms and small, wood-frame houses. “Pretty much all of western Massachusetts did, really, but that’s largely because people here have always been rather self-reliant. But this town had a particular advantage, though, in that it has three schools…the state university, Amherst College, and Hampshire College. That meant that it had an advantage that other places lacked…mainly, more than the usual number of educated people who knew how to use the resources they had.”
Jorge gazed through the windows. The houses appeared to be well kept; most had rooftop solar arrays, and every so often he spotted small greenhouses in their backyards. “I’m surprised Black and his people didn’t try to take over. You’re n
ot that far from Boston.”
“Yeah, well…we did have to worry about them.” Vargas glanced over the front seat at him. “Even though the Provisional Army wasn’t much of a threat to anyone outside Boston, Black had great ambitions. He wanted to…”
“I know. He told us that he wanted to bring back the United Republic of America.”
“Uh-huh.” Vargas smiled. “Thanks to you, though…whether you know it or not…they’re no longer a threat to anyone. The raid we made on their hideout pretty much put an end to them.”
That remark gave Jorge a clue as to what was going on. “By ‘we,’ I take it you mean the Terra Concorde. I assume you belong to them…whoever they are.”
Vargas looked away, becoming quiet once more. Ahead of them, the ambulance turned left onto a side street; Jorge caught a glimpse of a road sign marked HOSPITAL, and knew that this was where McAlister was being taken. He thought that Vargas was going to revert to his earlier reticence, but then he looked back at him and Inez again.
“I’m with the TC, yes,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this earlier, but…well, to tell the truth, I didn’t know it myself.”
Jorge stared at him. “How could you not…?”
“I think I know.” Inez’s voice was very quiet. “You were memory-blocked, weren’t you?”
At first, Vargas didn’t respond, but then he reluctantly nodded. “I guess you’ve figured that out. Yeah, I was.”
“Memory-blocked?” Jorge peered at him. “What…you mean you were brainwashed or something?”
“That’s something else that another person should explain to you,” Vargas said. “To be honest, I barely understand it myself.” A rueful smile that quickly disappeared. “Believe me, though, it was necessary for this whole plan to work…and, yes, there was a plan behind all this. Nothing…ah, well, almost nothing…that happened was by accident.” He turned back around again but continued speaking. “Anyway, Amherst is also the location for the New England satrapy of the Terra Concorde…”
“Which is what, exactly?” Jorge leaned forward in his seat. “C’mon, Sergio, enough with the mystery already. You owe us an explanation.”
“I’m getting to that.” An annoyed glance, then Vargas went on. “The Terra Concorde was formed about twelve years ago in Canada, with the goal of restoring civilization under a global government.”
Jorge raised an eyebrow. “Not thinking small, are you?”
“No, we’re not. But when all the major superpowers collapsed, beginning with the Western Hemisphere Union and continuing with the European Alliance and the Pacific Coalition, there wasn’t any other choice. Even the United Nations was in a shambles. Something has to fill the void, or else there’d be nothing but chaos.” Vargas looked back at Inez. “We have your father to thank for that. The chaaz’maha showed us the way.”
Her eyes widened. “But you said you hated…” Then she stopped herself, and smiled. “Oh. Now I get it.”
Get what? Jorge started to ask, but Vargas was already going on. “The TC got started at a conference in Montreal…one of the few cities in North America that didn’t fall apart entirely…and since then has grown into a worldwide organization. We now have chapters, or satrapies, in just about every country, where we’re working to do everything that needs to be done to bring about a global democratic coalition. But instead of adhering to the old ideologies, the Terra Concorde took the best of what’s worked in the past and tailored it according to our needs, while adopting the teachings of Sa’Tong as its guiding principles.”
“So my father is…?”
“Our leader?” Vargas shook his head. “No. Oh, he was offered the job, all right. During the founding conference in Montreal, quite a few delegates wanted to elect him General Secretary. But he refused, saying that being chaaz’maha precluded his taking any sort of formal position within the government.” He shrugged. “So he’s something of a spiritual advisor, and pretty much operates out of the Amherst satrapy.”
Remembering something else that Charles Black had said in the State House basement, Jorge slowly nodded. “That’s why the Provisional Army wanted to get their hands on him. Black saw the TC as a threat to his own plans to restore the URA. If they’d killed him…”
“Again, that’s something which ought to be explained to you by someone else.” Vargas looked away from them again. “Be patient. Your questions will be answered soon enough.”
Realizing that he’d get nothing more from him, Jorge reluctantly turned his attention to the van windows. By then, the vehicle had entered the Amherst town center, and he couldn’t help but notice its contrast with downtown Boston. Pedestrians strolled along clean and well-maintained sidewalks, walking past shops and cafes that were beginning to open their doors for business, while small electric cars moved along streets that looked as if they’d been recently resurfaced. The van passed the town commons, and Jorge caught a glimpse of the library, the fire station, the city hall. Nothing was boarded up; there were no armed men in sight. It was as if the meltdown of the Western Hemisphere Union had never affected this small New England borough; the citizens of Amherst had refused to let their home collapse into ruins.
Turning left, the van followed another side street through a residential neighborhood until it reached a large granite sign: THE UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS. “Welcome to UMass,” Vargas said, as the van entered a sprawling, tree-lined campus. “That’s not all it is now, though. It’s also the Terra Concorde’s New England headquarters.”
Jorge gazed out at ivy-covered classroom buildings, high-rise dormitories, sleek glass-walled laboratories; some were relatively new, others obviously several centuries old. A left turn, then a right; the van passed two enormous geodesic domes built in what had once been an athletic field, the tall, slender pylons of wind turbines rising behind them. “Guess it makes sense to put it here,” he said. “If you’ve got a university in a safe place…”
“Uh-huh. Amherst had already done the hard work of providing a stable environment. As I said, it comes from having so many teachers, students, and intellectuals living in one place…they didn’t want their town to go to hell, so they got together and did something about it. So when the time came, the Terra Concorde only had to move in and set up their regional headquarters here…in fact, there it is.”
Turning into a driveway, the van headed up a small hill toward a tall, slender building rising above the campus center. Twenty-six stories in height, it was built of red brick, with narrow, slotlike windows along its sides. The van circled the tower before gliding to a halt beside the elevated plaza surrounding it.
Vargas climbed out of the van, then opened the passenger door for Jorge and Inez. Jorge noticed an inscription above the building’s front entrance: W.E.B. DUBOIS LIBRARY. “The TC took over the school library?” he asked. “I’m sure the university must have loved that.”
“Actually, they didn’t mind at all.” Vargas led them up the plaza’s concrete steps. “It was built in the late twentieth century, when the faculty and students still relied mainly on printed material. After everything went digital, though, it wasn’t used for much more than storing old textbooks.” He grinned as they approached the front door. “The irony is…well, you’ll see.”
They entered the library through a ground-floor lobby, then walked down a flight of stairs to a spacious mezzanine located in an underground sublevel. A few dozen men and women—most of them Inez’s age or younger; Jorge assumed they were students—were seated at carrels surrounded by stacks of crates and cartons. A few of the boxes were open, revealing books of every description: history volumes, science references, novels, poetry collections, atlases. The students barely glanced up as Vargas ushered Jorge and Inez through the mezzanine; opening one book at a time, they briefly inspected their title pages and contents, then typed the information into the keypads of their desk comps before carefully placing the books on nearby library carts.
“One of the principal tasks of the New England s
atrapy is gathering and preserving published material.” Vargas spoke softly as they paused to look around the room. “Not everything was digitized before the collapse, and there are still a lot of libraries and private collections scattered around the world that have paper books. A lot of them were used for firewood, or burned by extremist groups like the Provisional Army, before the TC made it a goal to save as many books as possible. The students here are processing the ones we’ve been able to gather before they’re sent upstairs to be scanned.”
“What happens then?” Inez asked. “I mean, what becomes of the books you’ve scanned?”
“They’re being preserved for future generations. A lot of electronic databases were lost in the collapse, too. No one wants to have that happen again, so this time we’re saving the books as well.” Vargas raised a hand toward the ceiling. “This is why it’s terrific that we’ve been able to acquire a library of this size. Once the cities are rebuilt, we’ll be able to send our collection to local libraries around the world.”
Turning away from the carrels, he led them to the center of the library, where a row of elevators was located. Vargas moved a palm across a lighted arrow, and the doors of one of the lifts slid open. He raised a finger above a button marked 26; the doors shut, and the lift began to rise. “There’s more here than just books, of course,” he continued. “Data storage and retrieval, intelligence analysis, administrative offices…”
“Never mind that.” Jorge was unable to keep the impatience from his voice. “You said we were going to find the chaaz’maha. So where…?”
“Soon.” A sly smile as Vargas gazed at the flashing numbers of the floor indicator.
The elevator reached the top floor. A quiet chime, then the doors slid open again. Walking out into a short corridor, Vargas escorted them to a small, glass-walled anteroom. A young woman behind a desk looked up as they came in. She didn’t ask who they were or why they were there, but instead rose from her chair and turned toward a mahogany door behind her. Not bothering to knock, she opened the door, then stepped aside and, a soft smile upon her face, bowed ever so slightly.