by Blake Banner
As I sprinted for the stairs down to the lobby I saw Maria on her cell, while Olsen was dialing his own. The lobby was empty, as was the plaza outside. On First Avenue, there was a cordon of cops and patrol cars. I pushed through the door and walked toward them. Two SWAT guys in body armor came running toward me. As they approached, I said, “It’s OK, it’s been diffused.”
They took my arms and hurried me toward the cordon, shouting at me, “Are you OK? Are you injured?”
“No. The area is clear. The bomb has been diffused.”
I could see the captain behind the cordon talking on his cell phone. I pointed at him. “Talk to the captain. He’s on the phone to one of his officers on the inside right now.”
We had arrived at the cordon and they shoved me through, between two vehicles. The captain was approaching me. Before he could ask me any questions I put my left hand on his shoulder and pointed at the building.
“The situation is contained. There was a bomb concealed in a wheelchair. It has been diffused. You have an officer in there who has just spoken to you on the phone. The area is clear, Captain. I repeat, the area is clear. You can go in.” I flashed Mclean’s badge at him with my finger accidentally over the picture. “Now I need to go. My suspect is getting away. I will report back to you this afternoon. Now get in there and secure the evidence, Captain!”
I walked away toward 42nd Street and felt his eyes on my back for a full five seconds. Then I heard a shout, but it wasn’t calling me back, it was ordering his men to proceed into the UN. I glanced back and saw them on the move. That was when I started to run.
I scrambled around the corner onto 42nd, clambered into the Zombie, and wrenched the tracker from the glove compartment, praying to whatever deities deal with that kind of stuff that Gibbons still had the tracker in his pocket. I switched it on and the bleep was there. The location was obvious. Teterboro Airport, in New Jersey.
Nineteen
I spun the Zombie and accelerated down 42nd Street, leaning on the horn as I went, and wishing for once that the twin engines made a noise. I needed the other drivers and the pedestrians to hear me coming, and I needed them to get out of the way. I moved to the center of the road and stayed at a steady forty miles per hour. The oncoming cars flashed their lights at me and the cars I left behind added their horns to mine. Pedestrians scattered and shouted abuse the way only New Yorkers know how.
When I got to 10th Avenue, I careened right, standing on the footbrake, jumped the red light, picking my way through the scattering crowds who were trying to cross the road, then hit the gas and started accelerating again, dodging from lane to lane, moving north doing fifty, reaching for sixty, with the brakes and the tires screaming as I weaved among the cars, taxis, trucks, and buses. I kept going north until I’d passed Washington Heights. Then I skidded into West 179th and hurtled across the narrow tip of the island onto the George Washington Bridge. Once I was there, I opened her up and felt the surge crush me back in the seat as the massive twin engines delivered their one thousand eight-hundred foot-pounds of torque, instantly to the back wheels, and the beast hurtled forward, touching a hundred and twenty miles per hour in less than a second.
I followed the I-95. The other cars on the highway looked stationary as I flashed past. At Ridgefield Park, I slowed to come off onto Route Forty-Six into Teterboro. As I did, I checked the tracker. He was still there, and the voice in my head was yelling at me that this was wrong. They should have flown out before the explosion. Why had they waited? Why, when the bomb had not exploded, had they not left immediately? It didn’t make any sense.
I raised smoke from the back wheels skidding from Route Forty Six onto Hollister Road, screeched to a halt outside the airport, and killed the engine. Then I sat, staring at the wheel, with no idea of what I was going to do next. I reached in my pocket and pulled out a pack of Camels. As I opened the box and extracted a cigarette, I noticed my hands were shaking. I lit up with my battered, brass Zippo and inhaled deeply. I couldn’t afford to go into shock right then. If you know how to use it, shock can help you recover and heal. But it won’t help you fight and win. I had to postpone it.
I put the tracker in my pocket, popped the trunk, and climbed out. I tossed the Smith & Wesson 500 back in my kit bag, pulled out my remaining Sig and stuck two magazines in my jacket pocket. Then I had a look at the airport. It was internal, business flights only, mainly small, executive jets and air taxis for businessmen. Security seemed to be minimal. There was only a five-foot iron fence between the sidewalk and the air fields; air fields which right then seemed to be completely devoid of activity.
I walked the hundred yards to the main gates and in toward the terminal building. I pushed through the glass doors and found myself in a large, empty lounge with elevator music playing through the PA system. The boards displaying the flights showed every one of them as cancelled. Clearly Homeland Security had been informed and were taking over.
There were a couple of desks with women in uniform sitting behind them, looking bored. I pulled out the tracker and checked it. He was less than a hundred yards away, out on the tarmac. I walked to the large viewing windows and saw the plane. It was a ten-seater Dassault Falcon. Gibbons was on board and Marni was almost certainly with him. Obviously Ben had special clearance to fly.
I heard heels echoing on the marble floor behind me and turned. A tall, blond woman in an Atlantic Air uniform was walking toward me, looking straight at me. She didn’t smile until she was three or four feet away. Then she stopped and said, “Are you Mr. Walker?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“They are waiting for you. Will you follow me, please?”
I frowned. “They’re waiting for me? Who is?”
“Your party. They are already embarked. You’re cleared for takeoff. This way.”
I followed her across the hall, through an emergency door, and along a narrow passage. She held open another emergency door for me and next thing, we were on the tarmac. After that, she led me the seventy or eighty paces to the steps that led up to the jet. She wished me a comfortable flight and left. I watched her walk away, back toward the terminal building, then turned and climbed the stairs up into the plane.
There was something unreal, or perhaps surreal, about the scene that met my eyes as I entered the cabin. Yet I was aware that for that small world where Ben operated, detached from the rest of humanity, this kind of thing was the norm. It was like a luxurious old world drawing room stuffed into a tube. There were leather sofas and big leather armchairs. The walls were paneled in oak and there were art deco lamps on the high-polish mahogany tables.
Ben was sitting at one of those tables reading a document. In front of him he had a martini glass with an olive in it. For a freakish moment he looked to me suddenly like a very old man. Across the aisle from him was Marni, seated in a leather armchair, staring at me from behind an expressionless mask. Beyond them both, Gibbons was lying on a couch, apparently asleep. Opposite him on another sofa were two large men holding assault rifles. Behind me the door hissed and began to rise. A steward who looked as though he’d learned to be an in-flight attendant with the Russian Mafia, approached me from the back of the plane. He put a huge hand on my shoulder and gestured toward Ben’s table.
“Sir, we are about to take off, would you take a seat, please?”
Ben looked up as I approached and sat. He stared me in the eye, and for the first time since I had met him, he looked mad. His face was tight, his skin was pale and he had two red dots on his cheekbones. I raised an eyebrow at him.
“You are becoming a real pain in the ass, Lacklan.”
“Really?” I looked over at Marni. I smiled and she smiled back. I turned back to Ben. “I thought my trivial actions couldn’t hurt the mighty Omega.”
He drew breath, hesitated, blinked slowly, and finally said, “You can’t.”
We began to move. He pressed a button on the side of the table and a concealed TV screen rose and winked into life. It was
CNN and Alia Fadel was standing outside the UN Headquarters on First Avenue, holding a microphone and speaking. Behind her the cops, in bright yellow reflective jackets, had the road sealed off and there were half a dozen patrol cars, a SWAT van, and a couple of CSI vans all parked in the plaza inside the gates. She was frowning as she spoke.
“…nobody really knows what’s going on, Don. Everybody you talk to has a different story. There are lots of theories, lots of opinions, but so far there are very few facts, and those that there are, are very jealously guarded.
“What we do know is that patrolman Bill Dwight and his partner Maria Portillo arrested a man on the request of Director David Staines. Now, David Staines is not at present available for comment, nobody is very sure where he is, however, witnesses at the scene say they saw officers Portillo and Dwight lead away a man in handcuffs, put him in a patrol car, and then drive out of the UN complex onto First Avenue. And here is where it starts to get strange, because only moments later, the patrol car returned, with its sirens on, and patrolwoman Portillo and the man she had ostensibly arrested stormed into the UN building shouting that there was a bomb. Several witnesses have stated that at this point, the man was claiming to be FBI Special Agent Harrison Mclean. The FBI have made no comment so far.
“Whether there was or not a bomb is as yet unconfirmed, but security guards who were present at the time have told me that they saw the bomb with their own eyes, and that they watched the man claiming to be Agent Mclean disarm it. They also claim, and hold on to your hat, Don, that it was a tactical nuclear device concealed in a wheelchair. Experts from the Bomb Disposal Unit are currently in the General Assembly Hall, apparently examining the alleged bomb, but so far they have not issued a statement…”
Ben was rigid, staring at me. “You have no idea, Lacklan, how angry I am right now.”
I gave a single nod. “I am glad to hear it.”
He closed his eyes and steadied his breath. “At least,” he said, “you performed this much of your part of the bargain.” He gestured to Marni.
I shook my head. “No, I didn’t. I told her to go to Boston.”
He echoed my single nod. “I see. Give me one reason why I should not kill each one of you.”
I exploded. “You’re out of your fucking mind, Ben! The only reason we, and a hundred thousand other people, are not dead is because I managed to dismantle that goddamn bomb! What fucking planet are you on?”
We had reached the runway and now the jet stopped and the engines began to scream as they prepared for takeoff. Next thing, we were accelerating down the runway and rising up into the sky above New Jersey. I stared at him in silence throughout, then said, “What? You’re so mad at me for not letting you kill us, that now you want to kill us?”
“You know, sometimes you are a very stupid man, Lacklan. If you had stayed at the Institute, as you were supposed to, you would not have been at risk. Did it ever occur to you that I might have put you there for your own protection?” I had no answer for that and he went on, “And as for Marni and Professor Gibbons, if they had accepted our invitation in the first place, to join us and work with us, they would not have been at risk, either. You were all three at the UN against my advice.”
Marni turned on him. “You were planning to murder hundreds of thousands of people! How can you sit there and tell us off—like children—for spoiling your monstrous plan? It’s inhuman! How can you live with yourself?”
He gazed at her and shook his head. “I am far too angry to even try to reason with you right now, Marni. I need to spend some time meditating and re-center myself. But you should know that you have both caused us a very serious setback.”
I burst out laughing. “You say that as though we should feel sorry.” I frowned at him. I had the strange feeling that I was talking to somebody who didn’t speak the same language as me, like I needed to articulate everything very carefully in order to make myself understood. “It has always been our intention to screw up your plans, Ben! You must know that! What is the matter with you?”
He took a deep breath. “I guess I thought, after our recent conversations, that I was beginning to get through to you. I thought we were beginning to have some kind of…” He hesitated, like he was searching for an appropriate word. He shook his head again. “Some kind of understanding. Obviously I was wrong.”
I nodded. “Yes, Ben, you were wrong. Perhaps the number of Omega operatives I have killed should have been a clue. Now, would you mind explaining to me what the hell we are doing on this plane? The woman at Teterboro told me you were waiting for me…”
He shrugged. “People die. If society could learn to accept this simple fact, the world might be a healthier place. The fact that you killed so many of our operatives told me nothing except that you are exceptionally good at what you do.”
Marni looked away. I sighed.
Ben went on. “And I might add, Lacklan, that there is more than just a hint of hypocrisy in your holier-than-thou attitude toward Omega. For you, of all people, to accuse us of murder is a little rich.”
He raised his hand and snapped his fingers. The big flight attendant approached. “Bring me another martini, and whatever they want.”
I ordered a Bushmills and Marni just shook her head and stared out the window. I asked, “Where are you taking us, Ben? What are you going to do with us?”
“I am taking you to D.C. I want you both to meet somebody.”
Marni turned her head and looked from me to Ben. “Both?”
“You and Lacklan. Professor Gibbons… We have different plans for him.”
She looked alarmed. “What plans?”
“It’s none of your concern, Marni. But in any case, I will fill you in when we are sure of how to move forward. Plans are in a bit of a state of chaos at the moment.”
He loaded the words with irony, like he was trying to guilt-trip her. I said, “Who do you want us to meet?”
“Someone who might help you to acquire a slightly more global perspective.”
“What does that mean, Ben? You want us to learn how to justify killing a million people?”
He held my gaze for a long moment, then said, “Or two million, or twenty, or a hundred. The number is not important. Let me ask you something, Lacklan, as you like to preach so much about right and wrong. Is it twice as bad to kill two people as one? How do you measure that? Is it worse to kill a mother and her child than it is to kill ten men? What if one of those men is Mahatma Gandhi, and the child will grow up to be Ted Bundy?” He gestured at me with his open hand. “You murder indiscriminately in the name of your crusade, to stop what you see as Omega’s evil plans. But what if by doing that, you are driving humanity toward extinction? What if our project is the only way to save humanity? Which one of us, then, is the evil one?”
I had no answer. Or if I had, I had no idea how to articulate it. Marni covered her face with her hands. Her voice came out muffled. “You cannot justify the indiscriminate murder of hundreds of thousands of people. There is no justification for an act like that!” She uncovered her face and looked at him. “How can you not see that?”
He frowned at her. “Who says I don’t see it?”
“What?”
“I see it more clearly than you do, Marni. For you it is an emotional impulse driven by a primal instinct to protect the tribe. But we are so far beyond the point where we can think in those terms! Look around you. We are hurtling toward eight billion people. About four and a half million people are added to the population—net!—every month! Feeding them requires massive industrial production and distribution, a process which is destroying the very environment we need in order to feed these people! We are parasites, Marni! And we are killing our host!” He sank back in his seat. “Now I ask you, do you kill that child, knowing he will grow up to be Ted Bundy or Adolph Hitler, or do you let him live, knowing what he will do when he grows to adulthood?”
Marni screwed up her face and turned away from him. “You’re sick!”
I sighed at him. “How does killing half of Manhattan help the world to survive overpopulation and climate change?”
He nodded. “That is a good question, but I am going to save the answer for tomorrow. We have some very serious business to transact in the morning, and you have a very important person to meet. For now, there are two things that I need you to do. The first is this. I would like you both to discuss, very seriously, how you would change Omega’s policy toward climate change and overpopulation. I am not playing you, this is a genuine request.”
I frowned, hard. All my alarm bells were going like crazy. Marni looked stunned, then turned, looked at Gibbons, and back at Ben.
“What about Philip?”
He ignored her and switched the TV back on. We were still at the UN and in the background you could see a gurney being wheeled out of the main doors toward a waiting ambulance. Alia Fadel was talking to the camera and pointing back toward the scene that was unfolding behind her.
“…this latest news has taken everybody by surprise. It is a huge blow to international efforts to get the world to agree on an agenda for sustainable growth, and a terrible shock for the international community. Professor Philip Gibbons was, despite his controversial and often confrontational style, highly respected and well liked. His contribution to this ill-fated conference was, according to his colleagues, going to change the face of international politics and world economy. Exactly why he was murdered by the man posing as Agent Mclean is as yet unclear, as is the whereabouts of his young protégé, Dr Marni Gilbert, whose own contribution to the conference was, apparently, going to have at least as seismic an effect as Professor Gibbons’. He will be sorely missed…”
He switched off the TV.