by Blake Banner
She burst out laughing. I had to laugh too, until I saw she was wiping tears from her eyes. She smiled and pulled a handkerchief from her pocket. “I’m sorry.” She blew her nose and managed to look both awful and beautiful at the same time. “It was what I loved so much about you. Even back then.”
I held out my hand to her but she jumped down without taking it. As she moved away, I said, “Marni…”
“I know. We haven’t got time for this now. I’m being stupid…”
“Marni!” She turned to me. I moved to her and took her shoulders. She stared up at me. I cupped her small face in my hands, hands that had taken so many lives, hands I had felt ashamed to touch her with when she had come to me, all those years ago in London, when I had turned her away. Now I said what I had been unable to say then. “I love you.”
She took my hands in hers and kissed them. Then gave a single, tragic laugh. “Now? Like this?”
I sighed. “In case I don’t get another chance.” She took my arm in both of hers, rested her head on my shoulder and we walked on through the trees in silence for a while, listening to the crack of twigs under our feet, the shouts of the little girl growing more distant, and the chatter of the birds above in the growing dusk, as they prepared for the night.
Eventually, we stood on the banks of the Potomac, looking down at the great, dark snake moving slow, steady, and irresistible toward the ocean, and she asked me, “So what do we tell them?”
I stared at the great river for a long while. Then I gave a small shrug. “We tell them that we want Omega to gather the world leaders, and start a concerted initiative, a serious program through the UN, to halt climate change and humanely reduce the population of the Earth, over the next ten generations, to a number that the planet can sustain. We tell them we want them to invest the same kind of energy and commitment into that enterprise, that they would normally invest in making war.”
She smiled up at me and made no effort to hide the irony in her face. “Seriously?”
I nodded. “Seriously.”
“They’ll laugh in your face.”
“Maybe they will, but Ben has a point, Marni, and though I hate everything that he and Omega stand for, when he asked us to come up with a proposal, he had a point. We can’t only oppose. What are we fighting for?” I turned to face her. “We have been fighting to stop them. But if we stop them, then what? What do we put in their place? Have we got a better option?”
She sat on the grass, on the banks of the river, and I sat next to her. She said, “How do you reduce the population of the world, without infringing people’s rights and liberties? How do you make seven and a half billion people agree?”
I remembered Salman Awad’s words at Prince Awad’s party. I said, “You give them a common enemy, make them aware that they face a common threat.”
After a while she shook her head. “That might work with ten people, a hundred, a thousand, maybe even a few million; but seven and a half billion people, from different nations, different cultures, with different faiths and religions…” She shook her head again and threw a small twig toward the river. The breeze caught it and carried it away. “You and I both know that is impossible.”
I nodded. “I know. But that’s the fight, and we have to fight it.”
“So that’s what we tell Ben?”
I didn’t answer straight away. When I did, I said, “Did I ever tell you it was my mother who chose my name?”
She frowned. “No.”
“She was descended from Danish Vikings. She’s a tough cookie, hard as nails. The name means ‘Norse Raider’, a man from the fjords. She loved the philosophy of the Norsemen. She used to tell me, ‘You fight, Lacklan, and you keep fighting. You don’t give up, ever. One day you will die, and that will be the end of your story in this world. But when that time come, you must look back over your life and be able to say, I never gave up.’” I smiled. “You give up when you die, not before.”
She gave her head a small sideways twist. “Wow…”
I laughed. “Yeah, but there’s more.”
“More? Really?”
I nodded. “Yeah, after she had given me her talk, she would then lean toward me and fix me with her blue eyes. She would raise one, devastating eyebrow, and say, ‘But it’s not enough to fight and never give up, Lacklan. You have to win! Win or die!’”
I stared at her sweet, beautiful face and said, “Repeat it with me, Marni, win or die.”
“Win… Win or die.”
Twenty One
The car arrived the next day at five minutes before two. It was a black Cadillac and the driver was in uniform. He saluted and held the door for Marni. I climbed in the other side and we took off. We crossed the Chain Bridge and then followed the George Washington Parkway at a sedate pace along the banks of the Potomac, all the way to the Arlington Bridge. From there, we took Washington Boulevard and arrived at the Pentagon at just after two-twenty.
We stopped at North Parking and our driver led us, as I had been led once before, to the Corridor 8 entrance. There we were met by a man in a suit with a wire in his ear, who had ‘Secret Service’ written all over him. He handed us a couple of badges, then led us through rings E, D, and C to Ring B. The way it works at the Pentagon, the closer you get to the center, the closer you get to absolute, temporal power.
We stopped at Ring B, and there we rode the elevator up two floors to room 32. He knocked on the door before opening it and announcing, “Mr. Walker and Dr. Gilbert, sir.”
He stood back, holding the door for us, and we stepped inside. There was the flag against one wall, and a portrait of the president. There were mahogany bookcases, and a nest of black leather chairs and a sofa around a coffee table. A large, oak desk stood by a window that overlooked an internal garden. I knew that having a view of that garden meant you were at the heart of power.
Ben was sitting with his ass on the desk, watching us. There was another man standing at the window, in silhouette. He turned as we came in and the door closed behind us. It was former president Dick Hennessy. There was a moment of awkward silence. Ben broke it.
“Hello, Marni, Lacklan. Come in. I’d like you to meet Beta, though you may be more comfortable calling him Mr. President, or sir.”
I took three steps across the room and stood looking at the man. He watched me back, with cold, hard eyes. I said, “I can think of several things to call you, Hennessy, but none of them is sir.”
He didn’t answer, but Ben said, “Let’s not get off to a bad start, Lacklan. Take a seat. Marni…?”
He gestured us toward the nest of chairs and the sofa. Marni sat. I ignored him and crossed the room to where he had his tray of drinks. I poured myself a whiskey and showed Marni the decanter. She shook her head. I turned and looked hard at Ben.
“This is the second time I’ve seen you in this office, Ben. Whose office is it?”
He was standing by the sofa, waiting for me to sit. He thought about my question for a moment, then shook his head. “No, Lacklan, you have had enough concessions. I have given you more than your fair share of latitude. Now it’s time for you to give me something. Join us, and I will make you privy to that kind of information. Now, will you please sit, so that we can begin?”
I looked at Hennessy. He had his arms crossed and he was watching me with interest. I sipped my whiskey and shrugged. “What’s the matter, Beta, you’re not going to sit down and join us?”
He didn’t answer, but after a moment he walked slowly over and took a chair. Before he sat, he drawled in his strong, Texan accent, “You are one confrontational son of a bitch, aren’t you, Lacklan?”
“Yes.”
“Well, will you do me the courtesy of sitting with me and discussing a few issues?”
I smiled on the right side of my face. “Sure.” I sat. “What issues?”
He and Ben sat too. Hennessy was pensive for a moment. “It kind of irks me, Lacklan, I have to tell you, that I know you are going to take what I’m goin
g to say next, with cynicism, and you will dismiss it. But I’m going to say it nonetheless, because it is the truth.” He paused and, oddly, seemed to study Marni’s face. “Bob Walker—your father, Lacklan, was my closest friend. I loved him like a brother. More than a brother. He was a comrade.”
I didn’t hesitate. “Is that why you made him kill his own best friend?”
His answer surprised me. “Yes, Lacklan. That is exactly why. But I am not going to explain that today because there is no way you can understand it. Because it has to do with commitment, loyalty, and love on a level which is beyond the likes of you.”
I felt a hot pellet of anger in my belly, but controlled it. “That’s a love that kills.”
“Like I said, I am not even going to try to explain. You might as well try to describe air to a fish. But I am going to ask you both something. And I want you to understand that we have never before asked this of anybody outside the twenty-seven permanent members. So you can understand that this is a mark of our respect for you, and especially both of your fathers.”
Marni frowned. “Both…?”
He nodded. “Your father refused membership. We offered it to him because he was an exceptional man. He refused, even knowing what the consequences would be. So we had to kill him, because he would have destroyed us. But we respected him for his commitment to his own beliefs.”
She looked at me, as though she was searching for something in my face. There was a wordless exchange between us, and then Hennessy was talking again.
“I am going to ask you a question which your father was never able to answer, Marni. How can we save humanity from the catastrophic changes that are coming? How can we avoid the millions of deaths, the famine, the flooding, and still preserve all the best that humanity has achieved?”
She stared at him a long time without answering. Finally, he sat forward, with his elbows on his knees, and said, “You condemn us for the way we run Omega. Now I want you to tell me how I ought to be doing my job. And I promise you, Marni, that I will listen to you with an open mind, and an open heart.”
She took a deep breath. “First, Mr. President, the whole world must be informed of what is coming. Every single individual has the right to know the threat that he or she faces. If we are a plague on this planet, as we certainly are, then each of us needs to take responsibility—personal responsibility for reducing the population. It only requires each family to have only one baby, and within a generation…”
“We can come to the technicalities later, Marni. Let’s stay with the general principles for now.”
“Fine. Then the first thing would be to inform the entire world of the facts concerning climate change and overpopulation. Second would be a managed reduction of the population, and a steady, phased move away from the global, mass market, so that we can eliminate our reliance on fossil fuels. And third, engage the leading universities of the world in a systematic program to transform the way we get energy—to move away from fossil fuels and toward solar power, wind turbines… The more the population is reduced, the more feasible that becomes.”
Hennessy nodded a few times after she had finished, then turned to me. “What about you, Lacklan? Have you anything positive to contribute to this discussion?”
I shrugged. “As you know, we went for a walk last night, where we could get away from your bugs…”
Ben said, “The house is not bugged. If you’d asked me, I would have told you.”
I raised an eyebrow at him, then turned back to Hennessy. “We discussed our options; in the end, we agreed that those were the realistic options. I stand with Marni. If we are talking in generalities, those would be the obvious steps.”
Hennessy scratched his cheek, then leaned back in his chair. “Obvious, yes, realistic, no, not really. And please let me explain why…” He hesitated. “Then I’ll come back to my reasons for asking you, and to my proposal for you both. But first, let me explain why this is not a realistic suggestion. You see, whichever way you cook it, there are always going to be two options. The one you have suggested, and the other one. The other one is to ensure the participation of a small, powerful elite, insulate yourself from the damage as much as you can, and let ninety percent or ninety-nine percent of the population wipe themselves out. Then create a new society that works, with you at the top, running things. After five, ten, fifteen generations, the heirs to that elite will inherit a beautiful, stable, sustainable world.”
Marni drew breath to say something, but he held up his hand. “Just hold on, and hear me out. Now that option, the one that you two both detest so much, is open not only to us, but to the Chinese, the Russians, the Muslim kingdoms, and Europe. It’s open to anybody who has all the information. Knowledge, if you’ll forgive me for using an old cliché, is power. Now, we would have to be plumb stupid to give away the kind of information that we have been able to gather through NASA and other sources, and allow ourselves to be sabotaged so that China, or North Korea, or Saudi Arabia, can seize the advantage and come out on top.”
Ben had been nodding throughout this monologue. Now he said, “And that is without getting into the details of how we handle massive climate migration once the droughts start in earnest. The Middle East is already in the midst of the worst drought in recorded history. That can only get worse and spread. Once drought turns to famine on a global scale, as it soon will, and there is not enough—” He stopped, staring hard at Marni, then continued with almost savage emphasis. “Simply not enough food to feed everybody. Once that happens—and we are talking a decade or two at the very outside—once that happens, Marni, what do we do? All the information that you want to give these people will only fuel the chaos and the strife that is going to engulf the world. It will not help anybody, but it will lead to war.”
Hennessy studied us both for a moment. Then, he drew breath and started to speak again. “However, having said that…”
Ben cut him short. “It is, Marni, Lacklan, like being in a city with three hundred thousand people all dying of some dreadful disease. And you know that in one, small clinic, there is enough medicine to save only two hundred people. If you spread the word to the city, the consequences will be devastating. And in the end the medicine, if it is not destroyed, will fall into the hands of the most violent and the strongest, the Hell’s Angels or the Mafia. Your other option is to select the best, the finest, and offer them a share of the medicine.” He turned and smiled at Hennessy. “Dick, forgive me, I interrupted you.”
“It is a perfect simile. I was going to say that, in spite of this, because we admire you and because we loved your father, Lacklan, we are prepared to make you a very significant offer.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Join or die? I’ve been made that offer before, and I’ve lost count of how many of you people have died since then.”
Hennessy sighed. “That is not the offer. We will create a committee for the purpose of studying your suggestions and finding a workable way to implement them. We will go further than that. We will make you both directors of that committee, with executive powers, to give it teeth. You can start as soon as you like, select whoever you want for the committee, and, within certain reasonable bounds, start reaching out to people to find a way forward. If you can make it work, then we will be happy to follow your ideas.”
Marni was frowning hard. “What?”
Ben laughed. “It’s not as incredible as you think, Marni. We are happy to do this for two very simple reasons. First, we don’t believe it’s possible, and you will discover that as you try to make it work. And second, if you can make it work, it will be everybody’s preferred way forward.”
She stared at him, then stared at me. I sighed loudly and reached into my jacket for a packet of Camels and my Zippo. As I lit up, Hennessy said, “You can’t smoke in here.”
I leaned into the flame, then snapped the lighter shut, inhaled deep, and blew smoke at the ceiling. “You want to come over here and make me stop, Dick?” I turned to Ben. “I have one,
real big problem with your suggestion, Ben.”
“I thought you might.”
“You planted a nuclear device at the UN. It would have killed somewhere between a quarter and a half of the population of Manhattan, men, women, children, indiscriminately.
“Now, here’s the interesting part about that. If you had wanted to cripple the U.S. economy for some reason, you would have picked the financial district. But you didn’t, you very deliberately picked the UN. Why would you do that?” I held up a hand. “Don’t answer, not yet. Before he escaped, Abbassi told me that Aatifa, Hassan, and Ali were set up, that the canister they thought they were planting was a dummy, that it was never intended to get through security.” I laughed and shook my head. “I thought at first that they were intended to get caught at security, while trying to enter. But that wasn’t it at all, was it, Ben?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“The plan was that I would see Abbassi at the party. That was why you sent me there, and I would go after him and expose the plot to bomb the conference, or at least alert the Feds, just as I did. But I was never meant to escape from the Institute. I was supposed to stay there in a drugged stupor, while you went ahead and bombed the UN. Then Mclean and Jones would have revealed to the president that they’d had a warning that Islamic terrorists were going to bomb the conference with a dirty bomb. Knowing this administration’s feelings about Islam, an all-out war was a certainty. What was Prince Awad’s reward? Membership of the Alphabet Club?”
He didn’t waver in his stare. He just said, “That is not the question, Lacklan. You can do better than that.”
“Yeah, you’re right. War in the Middle East is nothing new. You don’t need to nuke Manhattan for that. But if you can claim that hostile powers in the Middle East, like Iran, have nuclear weapons, then that would justify the president in using nuclear to retaliate in the Gulf. And I can’t prove it, but two gets you twenty that Russia would come in on the side of….”