Pierce nodded. “A blow for democracy.”
“Something like that, I guess. They’re planning to start fights with the police, get some martyrs for the cause. Some of ’em are bringing in automatic weapons.” Wes shook his head. “They’re absolutely crazy, and they’re my neighbours.”
Pierce asked a few more questions about the time and leadership of the protest, and then turned the truck back toward the highway.
“Are you going to be there?” he asked.
“We’d better be. Even the kids. They say they’ll take direct action against anyone who isn’t.”
“All right. You and Edith and the kids work out a hiding place somewhere in town, along the march route. Someplace you can duck into before the march gets to the Federal Building. We’ll miss some of the marchers when we break it up, and we’ll miss you. Then you get yourself back home and start calling around, see what kind of organization you can help put together once the leadership’s out of action.”
“You’re going to arrest them?”
“Of course.”
The Wabbies could certainly put on a show, Pierce thought. It was early afternoon, and the marchers had been driving into town since the night before. He would have wondered where they’d obtained the gasoline, except that he knew and would be taking appropriate steps.
They were tough-looking men, slouching around their muster point in down-filled vests and checked shirts. Many carried shotguns or rifles on their shoulders, or packed pistols on their belts. Their eyes were shaded from the watery autumn sun by baseball caps with the gold Playboy rabbit insignia of the Brotherhood.
If their women objected to that symbol, they gave no sign. They busied themselves with looking after children, making sandwiches on the tailgates of pickups, and gossiping with one another. They dressed like their men, and looked even tougher. As the wives of farmers and ranchers who had survived the last decade, they deserved to look tough, Pierce thought.
He studied them through binoculars from a third-floor window in the Federal Building, several blocks from the park where the Wabbies were gathering. This building would be their destination; obviously they didn’t intend to tire themselves out with a long parade, when all the action would come when they got here.
Colonel Richard Howell, commanding officer of the base Air Police, stood beside him.
“You’re sure you don’t want to ban the march and disperse them, sir?”
“No,” said Pierce. “They’d be all over town, making trouble in a dozen places instead of just one. Let’em march, let’em hear a speaker or two. The minute they try to break in, we grab their leaders and gas the rest. Then they’re marched back up to the park and sent home. Anyone coming back into town in the next six weeks will be arrested.”
“Okay, Colonel.” Howell talked quietly into a telephone. “Everybody’s set.”
The march began with a band playing military songs as the Wabbies formed into a column in the park. With a dozen American flags at their head, the marchers stepped out smartly and headed down the street.
“McVey and Williams and Krebbs are right behind the Dags,” said Howell.
“They’ll put themselves at the top of the steps, right at the main entrance,” Pierce predicted. “They’re armed, so don’t mess around with them. As soon as they try to get in, tackle them, get their guns, and get them inside while everyone’s still wondering what’s going on.”
“Right, sir.”
All told, the Wabbies had brought in over five hundred people. Half were kids, but half the kids had guns like their dads. Even so, Pierce felt disgust at people who would knowingly bring their children into danger. They marched in step, with squad leaders counting cadence. The sidewalks were crowded with local people who had nothing better to do. Placards and banners flashed in the sunshine: End the Emergency, Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, We Demand the Right to Vote, Right to Keep & Bear Arms, Free the Phoenix Six, Trainables are Kremlin Agents, For a Free White America.
The marchers crossed the square in good order and fanned out across the sidewalk and lower steps in front of the Federal Building as their band played themes from classic films like Star Wars and Rocky. Higher up, technicians had set up a podium and public-address system. Half a dozen Wabbie leaders, each carrying at least one gun, were clumped behind the podium amid a forest of flagpoles.
“Okay, let’s go downstairs,” Pierce said.
“It could get hairy, sir,” said Howell. “I’d rather you stayed up here.”
Pierce looked coolly at the colonel and shook his head.
The Air Police in the elevator with him were tense and eager. They licked their lips behind the clear plastic faceplates of their gas masks. Pierce said nothing and rubbed the tip of his swagger stick in the palm of his hand. He hoped he had chosen the right strategy.
The main floor lobby of the building was dark; the doors were locked and shaded, but the echoing snarl of Wabbie oratory penetrated and reverberated.
“The Communist Jewish bankers’ conspiracy has succeeded…taken away our right to vote…Blacks are running our great cities into stinking slums…the real Americans are fed up and fighting back…”
Checking the seal on his gas mask, Pierce fidgeted. When were they going to make their move? After a long time and several speakers, someone (it sounded like Krebbs) announced that he was going to enter the building and demand the right to cast his ballot.
“An’ God help the poor sucker who tells me I can’t!"
A fist thumped three times on the metal frame of the glass door, and then a rifle butt cracked it. Pierce pointed to an AP sergeant, who stepped out and unlocked the door. It swung inward, revealing Krebbs — a potbellied young man with long sideburns and a surprised expression on his face. The sergeant and another AP took the man’s arms and drew him inside, into the dimness and out of sight of the crowd. The sergeant brought his nightstick down on Krebb’s head; Krebbs dropped his rifle and sagged in the men’s arms as they hauled him across the lobby.
“LeRoy?” Another Wabbie was standing in the doorway, peering into the dimness.
“Get in here,” an AP ordered, and the Wabbie obeyed. Someone took his arm in a half-nelson and marched him away. In seconds, he and Krebbs were handcuffed together.
“Somebody’s in there!” yelled a man on the steps. “It’s a trap!”
“Let’s have the gas,” Pierce said quietly into his microphone. An AP promptly tossed two gas grenades out the door. They vented with a shrill, flatulent sound.
Pierce resisted the urge to check his Mallory’s impact setting as he ran out the door onto the terrace at the top of the steps. It had been set low, so that the flechettes would barely penetrate and the drug they contained would do most of the work. He saw Williams, the number two man in the Wabbies, coughing in the tear gas and trying to bring his shotgun to bear. Pierce shot him twice, once in the arm and once in the chest, and Williams dropped the shotgun. Pierce grabbed Williams’s beard and drew him inside. An AP took over and Pierce went back out.
The rally was breaking up nicely. The APs who had been hiding in the storefronts across the street had put several more gas grenades amid the demonstrators. No guns had gone off, but several Wabbies were down: nightsticks and Mallorys had taken them out. Children screamed; many of the demonstrators were already running back toward the park. APs and soldiers burst from other storefronts, clubbing the runners.
Standing behind the podium, Pierce felt the sting of tear gas on the skin of his neck and hands. Two APs flanked him, watching the remnants of the crowd stagger down the steps. Pierce pointed to one big, bearded man who was trying to aim his Armalite rifle at them despite the tears and snot running down his face.
“Shoot that man,” said Pierce.
The AP on his right lifted his Mallory and fired. The bearded man’s baseball cap flew off in a red spray; the Armalite clattered on the steps. The man kicked out with one booted foot and fell sideways.
“Shit,” said Pierc
e. “You weren’t supposed to kill him. Get him out of sight as fast as you can.”
While the APs lugged the body up the stairs and into the lobby, Pierce watched the white mist of the tear gas dissipate. Perhaps twenty people were still on the steps or on the street, unconscious or paralyzed by flechettes. The bystanders who had been watching the demonstration were long gone. The Wabbies who had run the gamut back to the park had lost several dozen more to the APs and soldiers. The rest were frantically clambering into their trucks and cars and driving out. No one hindered them.
Stragglers were being clubbed. Pierce saw Wes McCullough knocked down, with his wife and children around him. A little closer, a soldier was shoving a young woman along the sidewalk. Pierce saw long, dark braids and recognized her.
“Private Ruiz,” he said into his microphone, “apologize at once to the young lady, and then escort her up here to me.”
“Yessir!”
The woman looked suspiciously at the soldier, then glanced in the direction he was pointing, toward Pierce. Pierce raised a hand. She began to walk up the street, coughing and wiping her eyes. The soldier left her at the bottom of the steps, and she walked up to face Pierce, who had removed his face mask.
“My name is Jerry Pierce. And you’re Doria Killarney. I’m sorry you were involved in this mess.”
“So am I. I was just on my way home from school when these kooks went wild.”
“My kooks or their kooks?”
She smiled wryly. “Is there a difference?”
“I like to think so. Were any of your pupils caught in this?”
“They’re too smart. The first tear gas grenade, and they were gone. I stayed around to see the Wabbies get their asses kicked. Didn’t think I looked like Wabbie, too.” She blew her nose. “I guess if you know my name you know all about me.”
“I know some things.”
“You Trainables give me the willies. I’m sorry if that sounds rude, but tear gas does that to me.”
“Not at all. Can we do anything for you? Give you a lift home?”
“I wish you could give me a lift back about forty years. And let me take my kids with me, so they don’t have to deal with any more of this crap.”
“I wish I could do that, and go with you.” He put out his hand. “Again, I’m sorry. Call me if I can do anything for you and your school.”
She shook his hand briefly and firmly, and walked back down to the street: a small woman, very erect in a baggy sweater and patched slacks. Pierce smiled faintly as he watched her go. Very attractive, even if she was un-Trainable. He turned his attention to other matters.
The American flags around the podium had all toppled; they lay scattered on the granite amid the dropped weapons and bloodstains.
Do they all end like this? wondered Pierce. All the countries that start with heroes, do they end up with empty symbols and psychopathic halfwits who think they’re patriots?
He shivered. Once again he had bought his people a few more weeks, or days, or hours. The price was getting higher every time. The end was close, and he could see no escape.
That evening in New York, Eric Wigner pushed his chair back from his Polymath and smiled broadly.
“Jerry Pierce,” he murmured, “I’m going to start your first fan club.”
CHAPTER III
The Research Services Division of the Central Intelligence Agency maintained its New York offices on a floor of an anonymous building on East 52nd Street. Eric Wigner’s cubicle was windowless, barely large enough for his desk and filing cabinet and a few houseplants. He didn’t mind. The computer on his desk gave him, as he liked to say with a faint smile, “a window on the world.”
The machine, like Pierce’s, was a Polymath. Unlike commercial models, however, this one had no Polly. For security, it was not voice-actuated. But it had more power and intelligence than any commercial computer. Wigner had adjusted the screen to flicker at twelve pages per second, twice the normal rate for an Alpha-10 Trainable like himself. That was too fast for full conscious retention, but he had learned to trust his subconscious to alert him to useful information patterns.
As a result, he believed he possessed the best grasp of any individual in the CIA of current events in the United States. The knowledge bad depressed him at first, when he had begun four years before as a raw seventeen-year-old domestic intelligence analyst. With time, however, he had developed the shell of most CIA Trainables. Those who didn’t ended up taking their vacations in Dr. Franklin’s clinic in Woodstock. If Dr. Franklin’s conditioning didn’t take, the Trainable was rusticated to Records Division in Langley. Wigner had no intention of ending up there.
“The trick is to avoid living on a paper planet,” he remarked to Jasmin Jones one day over coffee. She had nodded, understanding: their superiors, all Trainables, tended to believe only what was printed out and to deal with information as isolated bits. They seemed unable to grasp the messages encoded in the overall flow.
“Be grateful some people do,” she replied.
“Oh, I am.”
That was an increasingly typical Trainable conversation. Wigner thought as he returned to his cubicle: brief, elliptical, rich in nonverbal content. Talking, especially to un-Trainables, took so long that it inevitably acquired an ironic quality. Jaz had told him that she was aware of the way he was manipulating Divisional Director Jonathan Clement; she had also conveyed neutrality on the issue, which was a little disappointing. One expected Trainables to ally themselves naturally against their plodding elders, but Jaz seemed almost fond of Clement.
She did not seem fond at all of Wigner, which he thought a pity because she was a dramatically good-looking woman, and which he thought a nuisance because it meant being circumspect with her when he would rather share his thoughts. Jaz was smart as well as Trainable, and the two qualities did not always go together. He would have enjoyed testing some of his ideas against her intellect and recruiting her into his own project.
That project was still vague, but the discovery of Jerry Pierce out in Idaho had helped to give it shape. Wigner was annoyed with himself: for too long he had simply daydreamed about what he would do when the Agency, and the government, came crashing down. Now he had a potential asset and must make up for lost time.
Wigner thought hard for most of the afternoon while data flashed steadily from the screen. At last he hooked into the office’s local area network and paged Clement. The screen seemed to freeze.
STATE REQUEST.
THREE DAYS’ PERSONAL LEAVE, EFFECTIVE MIDNIGHT TONIGHT.
PURPOSE?
REST & REHAB HERE IN NEW YORK.
A tedious pause, as if the request demanded serious thought. Clement knew perfectly well that Wigner had taken no leave in months. GRANTED. ENJOY YOURSELF.
THANK YOU. Wigner switched out of the LAN and returned his computer to shielded condition so that no one could monitor him. Then he used it to order a MATS flight to Mountain Home Air Force Base, leaving at 12:30 next morning.
Most RSD personnel lived within two blocks of the office, and Wigner was no exception. At the end of the day he shut down, locked his cubicle, and took the elevator to street level. Jaz Jones rode with him.
“I’m taking a couple of days off.”
“Great. Going anywhere?”
“And leave show business?”
She smiled. Wigner promised himself to sound her out again, when events had worsened and his project was more advanced. She would see the reasoning. Good heavens, the Agency itself had supplanted plenty of unviable regimes when circumstances demanded. This would be no different.
The problem, he told himself as he walked down 52nd to Lexington, was that his project had no great life expectancy either. Have to work on that.
The apartment was one of the best perks the RSD could offer: large, airy, secure, with reliable water and electricity. Wigner had rejoiced in its bookshelves, and had filled them with an eclectic assortment of titles and houseplants. He kept the place spotless a
nd tidy.
After a quick snack from the microwave, he showered and dressed for the flight. A shoulder bag took a change of clothes and his shaving kit, plus a new-fangled gadget called a flickreader. It looked like thick, opaque spectacles made of brown plastic. A narrow slot on the rim of the right “lens” could receive a strip of microfiche holding up to three hundred pages, and the flickreader could move through it either automatically or selectively.
With the flickreader Wigner packed a handful of microfiches, reports he had not got around to yet; the flight west would be a convenient time for them. Then he activated the apartment’s defences and left.
He was taking a chance, he knew. He had lied directly to Clement about where he intended to spend his three days’ R&R, on the generally safe assumption that RSD had better things to do than to monitor the holiday whereabouts of one of its analysts. But if Clement did find out that he’d left town, he would wonder what in Mountain Home, Idaho, could interest a young easterner. Wigner proposed to beg the question by ensuring that Clement remained ignorant.
A cab took him downtown, and he enjoyed a fine meal just off Washington Square. Half an hour of seemingly aimless wandering through the Village enabled him to shake off any possible tails; the streets were crowded, since the Village was still reasonably secure, so he could lose himself readily. On Houston Street he took a cab to Brooklyn, where he rented an old Buick at an agency on Bedford Avenue. The cost was outrageous, $400 plus gas and mileage for three days, but Wigner paid without a murmur.
“It’s the insurance,” said the rental agent. “It’s killing us. Leave a car like this out and it’s stripped in ten minutes. That’s why you gotta promise to leave it only in locked, secure parking areas, unnastan?”
“Unnastan,” said Wigner. He signed a false name to the contract, displayed adequate identification, and drove circuitously through the night to Old La Guar-dia.
Nowadays, of course, the airfield handled mostly military flights. A sentry with an M-21 slung over his shoulder inspected Wigner’s false ID (not what he had shown the rental agent) and ticket before waving him on. Wigner parked in an almost empty garage and took an elevator upstairs to the main floor of the terminal building. At least in the military the elevators still worked.
The Fall of the Republic (The Chronoplane Wars Book 2) Page 3