Daniel dragged the stunned security guard out into the corridor, and then all of them crowded into the elevator and pressed the button for G. The elevator doors closed, hesitated, opened again, and then eventually closed again. They stood staring at each other in total silence as the elevator rose to the first floor, and then opened.
The lobby was busy with security-guards and diplomats and messengers. It was a high-vaulted room, clad in mottled grey marble, with a huge chandelier suspended from the centre of the ceiling in the grandiose style of the Hotel Moscow. Telephones rang, feet clattered, and there was a busy buzz of conversation.
‘Come on, said Daniel. ‘All we have to do is look natural.’
‘Natural?’ queried Rick, looking around at all the Soviet diplomats and office-workers in their tight dark suits and their polished black shoes.
They crossed the lobby without being challenged, and pushed their way through the revolving-doors. Now they were out on the steps that led down to the sidewalk, and sunshine, and freedom. Susie gave a little childish whimper of tension.
‘We’ve made it, said Rick. ‘Would you believe it -we’ve made it.’
At that moment, two uniformed security guards stepped out in front of them. Out here on the street, they wore no badges, and carried their guns under their coats; but from the Cossack stolidity of their faces, and the way in which their hands were held in their pockets, it was
obvious that they would have no compunction about shooting to kill.
‘You will please return to the building, said one of the guards.
They stopped where they were. Rick started to raise his hands.
‘You will not put up your hands. You will do nothing more than turn around and re-enter the building.’
Daniel reached out and held Susie’s hand. ‘Mister, he said, ‘I’ve got a little girl here. She’s only seven. Have a heart, will you, let her go? She’s not going to do you any harm.’
Rick glanced at Daniel and all over his face was written the muscle-tightening message: Supposing the timing-device hasn’t worked. Supposing the rockets don’t explode.
One of the guards said to the other, ‘Call Comrade Skellett. These are the prisoners who escaped from the 10th floor. Tell him to come down here urgently.’
Then the guard turned to Daniel, and said, “The girl must remain here until your business with Comrade Skellett is completely settled. Those are my instructions.’
‘What did you say?’ asked Daniel.
The guard came up one step nearer, his coat held out threateningly. ‘I said - ‘
But his words were totally obliterated in the most colossal explosion that Daniel had ever heard. The marble-clad steps beneath their feet jumped into the air two or three feet, and threw all of them out across the sidewalk like skittles, scratched and bruised and breathless and tumbling over and over as if it would be impossible for them ever to stop.
There was a second explosion, then a third. Daniel, dazed, picked himself out of the roadway, and looked around for Susie. To his relief, she was only a few yards away, being helped out of the gutter by an elderly man. Kathy too was safe, and so was Rick, although Rick’s face was badly gashed.
A fourth explosion shook Pennsylvania Avenue, and huge chunks of masonry began to tumble from the Ikon
building as if it was an erupting volcano. Showers of glass and twisted aluminium window-frames clattered and sparkled down on all sides. Daniel picked up Susie in his arms and ran across the street, through the halted traffic, and as far away from the building as he could.
What happened next was spectacular: the public fall of a secret empire.
The first floor of the building collapsed into the basement, in a rolling billow of dust and smoke. Then, floor by floor, the entire building dropped in on itself, with a rending, thundering, tearing noise that made any kind of conversation inaudible, any kind of sensible thought impossible. Massive steel girders clanged down like the bells of doom, one on top of the other, and all the time there was a steady drumroll of breaking concrete, collapsing floors, tearing pipework, falling staircases. Soon it was impossible to see where the building had been: there was nothing but a cloud of dust, rising hundreds and hundreds of feet into the misty morning sky, and a persistent drizzle of grit.
It took the building more than ten minutes to fall, although most of its collapse was obscured from sight by dust. By the time the roof had fallen in, and the last showers of glass had come down, the emergency services had already arrived, and Pennsylvania Avenue was crowded with fire-trucks, ambulances, and police cars. Most of them were parked on the grass opposite the Post Office Department, some were parked on the sidewalks by the Internal Revenue Service building.
Skellett had died on his way down to the lobby in the elevator. He had reached the fifth floor when the rockets exploded, and the building started to collapse. The elevator shaft had gradually been compressed between two main structural beams, squashing the elevator sideways, and squashing Skellett with it. He had felt a hideous pressure on his ribcage, and on his skull, an intolerable compression that had made him want to scream out loud, if there had been any way of drawing breath to scream.
His last conscious feeling had been of his eyeballs being squeezed one by one out of their sockets, and of suddenly looking down at his own chest through blurry, dangling, unfocused lenses.
Ikon had died even before the ceiling came down, of a massive coronary. He had cried out, ‘No!’ just as Titus had cried out the very same words the previous night and then he had fallen across his breakfast table, his hand resting on a thickly-honeyed piece of bread.
Titus and Nadine, in fright, had got up from their seats. Nadine had said, ‘My God, it’s an earthquake! The building’s coming down!’
But Titus had turned back to her almost gleefully and shouted, ‘Earthquake, nothing! Some son-of-a-bitch has blown the whole damn thing up!’
Then the ceiling came down, tons of masonry and steel and concrete, and both Titus and Nadine had been swallowed. They were found later by firemen, bruised, crushed, but still holding hands.
Kama was saved by the traffic-jam on E Street. His limousine reached the intersection of E Street and 14th Street just as the Ikon building blew up, and he immediately ordered his driver to turn around. Through the tinted rear window, he saw dust and debris rising into the air, and knew that it had to be the headquarters of the Autonomous Capitalist Oblast of America.
If Ikon had been there when the building blew up, then the strong possibility was that ACOA would soon be his.
‘Where to, sir?’ his driver asked him.
‘Nowhere in particular. Don’t worry. Tomorrow, we’ll decide where to go next.’
Thirty-Eight
Daniel opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling. It was six-thirty in the morning, and the Arizona sun was already shining in bright bands through the drapes. He yawned, and rubbed his face, and then sat up.
Cara was still dreaming. He looked at her russet curls, at her pale bare back, at the flared curve of her bottom. He knew she was dreaming because she was murmuring to herself. He couldn’t guess what she was dreaming about, though. She was one of those ladies with secrets.
He climbed out of bed. It was four days since he and Susie had returned to Apache Junction; and they were settled now. Daniel was cooking up bacon and eggs as usual, Susie was back at school.
The pleasantest surprise had been to find that Cara was waiting for him when he returned; that she had hitchhiked west as far as Havasu City, and then decided to turn around and come back. ‘Don’t call it love, she had told him. ‘But I do want to stay.’
Kathy Forbes had gone back to the Flag to begin work on a multi-part exposŁ of what she had learned and experienced; a feature which her editor would eventually spike. ‘Nobody’s going to believe this,’ he would tell her, kindly. ‘If it’s true, and Ikon’s dead, then it doesn’t matter. If it isn’t true, it doesn’t matter, either. People don’t want to hear about this
kind of thing. I’m in the business of selling newspapers, not scaring people half to death.’
Rick Terroni had returned to Hollywood, and to the half-world of Free Columbia. He would die a year later in a traffic accident on the Ventura Freeway. The death would be reported in Variety, two lines.
Daniel picked his jeans up off the floor and wrestled his way into them. He thought of Willy Monahan, and what Willy would have said if he had ever found out what had happened. Perhaps Willy knew anyway, somewhere in Nirvana. Daniel had tried calling Williams AFB for news
of Willy’s funeral, but he had repeatedly been met with a courteous ‘Sorry, that’s family information. We’re not permitted to release it.’
He looked out of the window as he buttoned up his plaid Western shirt. He thought: at least America’s free again. A country that never even knew it was conquered. He rucked in his shirt, turned around, and went down to the kitchen to start breakfast.
What he had failed to see when he looked out across Apache Junction was the dark-blue rented Pontiac with the Texas plates parked next to Feeley’s Drugs. Inside it, listening to the radio with the patience of a man who has waited for hours, for days, for whole years for what he is after, sat Henry Friend.
The announcer said, ‘Good morning, folks. It’s going to be another hot one today.’
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