When the fist-sized award struck the wallscreen just to the left of and slightly below center, it was moving at a velocity commensurate with the arm strength of a former high school quarterback who could still throw a football forty yards on a line. The wallscreen shattered like a giant mirror, and the thump and crash were heard four offices away.
The aftermath, though, was less satisfying. What remained on the wall simply went opaque, without a single satisfying crackle or tendril of smoke.
Trent's executive secretary and chief administrative assistant reached his office door together. 'Are you all right?' Jolene demanded. Kenneth was drawn to the debris on the floor.
'Did you see?' Trent shouted angrily. 'Were any of you out there watching?'
'I saw it,' said Kenneth, retrieving the award and carefully brushing off the splinters of plastic and glass. 'He made it look like only crazy people want to be able to protect themselves.'
'You get out there and find out for me who Mallock is and what the hell he was doing there.'
'You think it was a set-up?'
'Hell, yes,' Trent said, weighting the words with all the contempt they could carry. 'Wilman's got four major newsfeeds there so quick they hardly miss a thing. Four newsfeeds that're covering and cross-promoting a live event for one reason only, they're hoping to show us a terrorist bombing, a mass murder, in real time. What's Wilman doing?' Trent threw his hands in the air. 'He takes the time to give us a university lecture on violence and fucking human evolution, knowing they'll broadcast every word because we're all tuning in hoping to see some carnage.
'He's not going to do that unless he knows there isn't going to be any carnage. You bet I think it was a stunt. And he's going to get away with it. It's a great story, courageous crusader, fanatic assassin, chilling brush with death. The son of a bitch.'
I'll see what we have on Mallock,' Kenneth said, placing the block on the corner of Trent's desk. 'And order you a new Trinitron.'
That left Jolene standing uncertainly in the doorway. 'Is there anything I can do, Mr Trent?'
'I don't even know what I can do,' Trent snapped at her. 'Sons of bitches - he was laughing at us, Jolene, you could see it in his eyes. They're killing people, taking away our guns and sending us out to face the wolves - they're murdering the Constitution - and he's lecturing us on morality?'
He snatched up the walnut block and hurled it at the wallscreen a second time. This time he was rewarded by some arcing and an acrid puff of smoke, but it was not enough to satisfy him.
'Leave me alone, Jolene,' he said darkly.
The secretary hesitated, then obeyed, closing the door behind her. When she was gone, Trent leaned heavily on his desk, chest rising and falling, blood pounding in helpless rage. 'So help me god,' he whispered, 'he doesn't deserve to be sleeping well at night. Let me be the one to take that from him. Give me courage, and patience, and wisdom, and somewhere, somehow, just one clean shot -'
Then, with shaking hands, Trent sat down and started to write out his resignation from the post of President of the NAR.
Over the next few weeks, John Trent told the friends who called the same thing he told the leeches of the media - that he had been President for twice as long as his predecessor and was ready to look at the issues from a new perspective, that he wanted to take some time off to travel and attend to personal matters, that he remained committed to an uncompromising defense of the Constitution and the essential liberties of citizens, and that he was exploring the possibility of becoming more directly involved in politics in ways the NAR was forbidden to pursue.
It was all true, but he made certain that his friends understood it differently than the political media, which devoted a couple of news cycles to dissecting the history of and prospects for single-issue third parties, and then turned its attention elsewhere.
By that time, Trent had begun to quietly make contact with the people he had chosen to make part of his endeavor. He limited himself to individuals - no committees, armies, associations, or militias. Their record in recent months was uninspiring, displaying a sorry lack of professionalism.
Bob Bowman was dead, having hung himself in a Virginia state prison while awaiting trial for running a Jammer van off the highway near Raleigh. Zachary Taylor Grant's plot against Supreme Court Justice Hannah Loeb was betrayed by a Hedgehog who pocketed half a million in FoxMedia payoffs for a video exclusive. Mel Yost was publishing Washington War Crimes from Barbados.
Among others making the headlines, the Boston Riders stronghold near Lake Champlain had been disarmed by an FBI Special Tactics unit. Three straight failures had left enough forensic evidence to link the Riders to the 'red letter' abortion clinic bombings across New England. Kelly Martin and the Freedom Sword were still at large in the upper Midwest, claiming credit for more than twenty bombings. But their choice of targets - mostly restaurants and retail stores in smaller towns that had seen few if any Jammer installations - was a public relations disaster.
There were a total of sixteen would-be assassins in Federal prison in connection with five different attempts to get to the
President. There had also been three known attempts against Comrade Wilman, eight against the Jew industrialist, five against various members of the Cabinet. Most had received little attention from the general media, which had apparently concluded that men being willing to sacrifice their lives and liberty for principle was a non-story. The dead and the imprisoned were heroes to the liberty media, but without fad diets, sex and celebrities to pad the ratings, it hardly amounted to more than static.
Patiently and deliberately, Trent studied each operation and all of the elements which had figured in the outcome. Not all those studies were instructive - incompetence rarely is. But two patterns did emerge, one of excessive complexity, the other of insufficient boldness. Most of what people wanted to call bad luck, he concluded, was not really luck at all.
Trent took what he learned to Atlantic City - to the New Flanders Casino Hotel, a site recommended by Angelo DiBartolo - for the only meeting there would ever be of the entire conspiracy. It was to be an odd meeting, though. All four of the conspirators traveled some distance to be in the same city, the same building, but Trent had decreed that they would never be in the same room or at the same table together.
Trent's first recruit had been Terry Stewart, a thirty-eight-year-old former CIA contractor who'd lost a lucrative billet as a paramilitary unit 'advisor' when Grover Wilman had exposed President Engler's covert war in Colombia. Stewart (or 'Gooch', as he preferred) had the training of a Special Forces commando, the connections of a mercenary, and a profile so low that just contacting him had required three intermediaries.
The second-riskiest job was the one Trent called The Winkler, the advance man who would work with all the bureaucracies to make arrangements for the confrontation. The Winkler would need to know exactly what was planned - it was not a job Trent could hire out blind. But his open involvement meant The Winkler would also need to be able to deny having known Trent's intentions, to convincingly claim he was merely hired by a client to do a job.
That combination of craven commercial motive, well-scrubbed ruthlessness and fluent lying called for a Hollywood lawyer. Trent found one in Roy Carney, whose small but well-respected firm had represented a number of conservative clients, and whose middle son was a member of the California Border Guards, an anti-immigration 'posse' whose volunteer efforts had put dozens of Hispanics in the hospital (and at least three in the grave).
The last piece of the puzzle was Atlanta security consultant Ben Brannigan, the mystery man behind the net postings of The Equalizer'. Just days after the Trigger was announced, The Equalizer' had penned a speculative, seat-of-the-pants analysis of how it could be defeated. His postings since then had contained ever more elaborate and authoritative critiques of both the technology and the security strategies which depended on it. Calling himself 'a free library', Brannigan had devoted himself to becoming the uncontested civilian ex
pert on Horton devices. There was no proof that he had ever done more than offer anonymous public advice, but Trent understood how to tempt a man who had pride.
They conducted their business entirely over the hotel's fiberoptic teleconferencing network, which DiBartolo had assured Trent was secure from snooping - even by the hotel's employees. Internally routed, a room-to-room call never went to either wire or air, and the PGP scrambler boxes in each suite thwarted local eavesdroppers.
'My family likes the Flanders,' DiBartolo had said, smiling genially. 'We've been holding reunions there twice a year for three years, and never had any trouble. They know how to be discreet. They know it's important to the health of their business.'
Taking that as gospel, Trent assumed that it was DiBartolo, then, who was responsible for the two microtransrnitter bugs Trent's squealer found in his suite. Trent had gone to DiBartolo for suggestions for a safe meeting place, but had neither told the mobster the purpose of the meeting nor invited him to take part in it. In that light, DiBartolo's curiosity was understandable. But Trent flushed the bugs down the toilet all the same. From that point on, he swept the suite after each time he slept, or left it, or a housekeeper entered, though he never found any other placements.
If DiBartolo was listening, he learned everything he needed to know in the first ten minutes, save for the names of the other players, which were never used.
'I intend to kill Senator Grover Wilman on live television,' Trent said calmly. He did not bother to offer any justifications for his decision; either he had properly judged the disposition and mettle of the three, or he had not. 'Your part in this is to help place me, Wilman, a weapon, and at least one working newscam in the same room at the same time.'
'Wilman doesn't go anywhere without a Jammer van. He lives in Horton space,' said the Equalizer. 'Are we going to try to coax him out of it, or beat his strength?'
'I can make him take whichever card we want him to be holding,' said Trent. That's what we have to decide together. But my first choice would be as much like a replay of Mallock as possible - face to face, in space Wilman thinks he controls.'
'Psych ops,' said Gooch. 'I approve.'
'I have a question about your scenario,' said the Winkler. 'Why did you include yourself in it? Or the cameras, for that matter. Just putting the bomb and Wilman together would accomplish the same goal - and that might be hard enough to pull off.'
'Not hard at all,' said Gooch. 'Just takes a big enough bomb.'
'And a sacrifice,' said the Winkler. 'But why go there? There are other ways to get him. He receives constituents. He travels between home and office. He goes to church.'
'No, he doesn't,' said Trent. 'He's a humanist - an atheist.'
Then we don't have to worry about god saving him, do we?' Gooch said with no hint of a smile. 'Look, a military sniper rifle has a useful range approaching a thousand meters. At anything under six hundred, even I can make that shot. He can't possibly be blanketed so deep under Jammer fields that he never pokes his head out, or wanders near the edge.'
'He almost never leaves the District of Columbia now, and D.C. is blanketed,' said the Equalizer. 'How are you going to get him out in the open for a head shot from five hundred yards?'
'No.' Trent was shaking his head. 'Listen to me, all of you. It isn't enough to kill him. There are a hundred ways we could do that and gain nothing. His death has to say that his cause is futile - if Grover Wilman isn't safe, how can any ordinary person hope to be? Better off with my own gun than counting on magic rays. And it has to be in public, with the cameras on. He loves the cameras. Before he dies, I'm going to show everyone that under the bluster, he's a liar and a coward. An impotent coward.'
The Winkler pursed his lips. 'Are you at all afraid of making him a martyr?'
'No. No, not for a moment,' Trent said emphatically. The real martyrs are the people who're dying because Grover Wilman disarmed them. It's for them that this needs to be done. Someone needs to rescue all those people at risk. Someone needs to set the balance right again. We can do that, gentlemen. I believe we can do that.'
'You know we can,' said Gooch.
'All right, then,' said the Equalizer. 'We're going to need to get him out of Washington. The question is, where to? Then we'll figure out how.'
'Let it be somewhere he thinks he controls us,' Gooch said. 'We'll teach him he's wrong.'
It was the closest Evan Stolta had ever come to screaming at Grover Wilman.
'Why are you even considering this? He's a loser, Senator, and all you can do is give him credibility. He lost his big case, his big push in Congress lost steam, and now he lost his job - you know they pushed him out. Why rescue him? Why elevate him to your level?'
Wilman smiled tolerantly, infuriatingly. 'Why let what he says go unanswered? Why be afraid of a little debate, if we believe in what we stand for?'
'So why does it have to be you? Let Martinson or Rocannon or Schultz do it,' Stolta insisted. 'You've got enough on your table. Gil Massey is threatening to bring S.B. 50 back to the floor, and you could be doing filibuster duty again before you know it. In fact, what if John Trent is still working with Massey? What if this big public challenge is just a game they're running on you?'
'To get me out of town, and slip the bill through Congress while I'm not looking?' Wilman laughed. 'You're a bit of a nervous Nellie, Ev. The Senate doesn't move half fast enough to pull that trick. I won't be traveling by carriage and plank road.'
Wearing a grim frown, Stolta sat down on the arm of one of the visitor's chairs. 'It's the traveling that worries me. Senator -' Stolta shook his head vigorously, searched for words. 'Things can happen. Why does this have to be done in person? You could have a huge audience in VR.'
'We can debate in person and still have a huge audience in VR,' Wilman said. 'What kind of things?'
'Grover -'
'I just want to see if you can say it.'
'All right,' Stolta said angrily. 'Because there are people who want to hurt you, goddammit. I don't think you should be giving them extra opportunities.'
'Do you think that's news to me, Ev?' Wilman said, his tone mild, almost diffident. 'I've been reading the hate mail every morning since before you came aboard. I know most of them don't mean it, and I know that some of them really do. I'm the lightning rod for every rabid-dog king-of-his-castle who thinks his world will collapse if he has to give up the right to shoot his wife, his kid, his neighbor, his boss, or the drunken tourist knocking on the wrong door.'
'I think you're stealing my lines, Grover. Isn't that my argument?'
'How do I win under those rules? Do I change what I believe, to try to make them love me? Do I go into hiding, so they can't touch me?' Wilman waved a hand dismissively. 'I know you know the answer. I have to be who I am, Ev. Living afraid is not my way. If it was, I'd be the one holed up in Nowhere, Idaho, sitting on a National Guard armory and eighteen months of stale crackers.'
A reluctant laugh softened Stolta's features.
'Besides, you're wrong about John Trent,' Wilman added. 'He wasn't fired. He really did resign.'
'Why would he do that?'
'So he could take the gloves off and call me out,' said Wilman. 'This should be fun. Work something out with that Roy Carney.' He laughed. 'Fifteen rounds of bare-knuckles should be just about right.'
There were eight hovering SkyEyes, nearly three hundred people, and three hundred empty seats in Tufts University's Cohen Auditorium for the debate between Grover Wilman and John Trent.
Ticket distribution had been handled by The Fletcher School of International Affairs, under rules intended to produce a diverse audience for what the dean had called 'an important affirmation of the democratic traditions of free speech and the marketplace of ideas'. He apologized to the participants backstage before introducing them.
'I'm terribly embarrassed - there was strong demand for tickets - our students are not apathetic, they're very socially and politically aware -'
'Ma
ybe the rumors about a riot had something to do with it,' Wilman said, looking levelly at John Trent.
'Riot? My god! What rumors are you talking about?' the dean demanded.
'My staff tells me that in the last few hours, there's been anonymized netmail coming into your system, addressed particularly to ticket holders,' Wilman said. 'One version said that you weren't going to show up, Mr Trent. Another said it would be smart to stay away, that there was going to be a riot in the auditorium -'
'A riot at Tufts - absurd,' the dean expostulated. This is not some state university party school. This is Tufts.'
The mail I was shown also included a bomb threat, naming me as the target.'
That's shocking,' said Trent, though his face showed no shock at all. 'Has the university received any threats directly?'
'Oh, no, no,' said the dean. 'I spoke with the chief of campus security just a few minutes ago. Everything's quiet outside. We've been discouraging everyone who doesn't have a ticket from coming into the area. But if what you heard is true. Senator, perhaps it explains why some of our attendees decided to stay home and plug in instead.' He shook his head sorrowfully. 'It's very, very unfortunate, but I'm afraid it's too late to do anything about it. At least you can count on those who are here being highly committed - attentive listeners.'
That's fine,' said Trent. 'I welcome an informed audience. My hope is that they'll be even better informed when we're done.'
The conspiracy's shortlist of prospective sites for the debate had included Princeton, the University of Pittsburgh, Columbia, Harvard, and even Carleton University in Ottawa - all home to notorious graduate schools of international affairs which would jump at the chance to bring Grover Wilman on campus. Brannigan had pronounced the logistics at Harvard and Columbia impossible, and Carney argued that Princeton had too positive a public image. Trent had ruled out Carleton on the grounds that crossing the border muddled the message, even though Brannigan had promised that an operation at the Canadian school would be a cake-walk.
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