Without Warning Part 41

"Do you believe him, though?" asked Caroline.

"Sarko? Who knows?"

"It seems a little incredible, don't you think, accusing the Loyalists of treason? They seem rather less discriminating than that. Anyone in their way gets killed, no matter what their allegiance. Street gangs, neofascists, jihadis. They've cut them all down at one time or another."

"Like I said, Caroline, it's confused. It's a mistake to think of this thing in terms of ma.s.sed armies maneuvering against each other. Alliances and loyalties are contingent. They can shift in minutes. An agreement negotiated at one level might have no effect at others, or farther down a city block. I think this is going to be one of those times where the winners definitely write the history."

"Well," Monty interrupted, "as another of your countrymen once pointed out, journalism is the first draft of history, and ours will be due in a few hours. So let's crack on, shall we?"

Leaving the office was no longer a matter of grabbing his equipment and stepping out to hail a cab. Melton didn't expect to see the compound again for a couple of days, and he packed accordingly. On the bottom of a small black rucksack he stuffed a layer of spare socks and underwear. On top of them some emergency rations, though he hoped he'd be eating with his embedded unit. On top of them went his equipment, a small digital camera and twenty-four hours' worth of videotape, three notebooks, and a couple of pens. He topped off with two handfuls of carefully h.o.a.rded chocolate bars and cigarettes, which he planned to share with "his" troops. He understood just how welcome an outsider with a small stash of luxuries could be.

It was raining again, quite heavily, enough to dull the sounds of close-quarters fighting. He couldn't see outside, but the steel plating that covered all the windows only served to magnify the sound of the downpour as the torrents. .h.i.t the metal. He pulled on his rain slicker over a BBC-issue ballistic vest and snagged a pair of goggles to protect his eyes. The toxic rain wasn't nearly as bad as it had been a few weeks back, but letting the water run into your eyes still felt like swimming in a hideously overchlorinated pool. The last item, he took his time with. It was a controversial choice, a personal weapon. Some of the reporters, like Caroline and Adam Mynott, who'd arrived from Afghanistan with the last of NATO's returning contingent, refused to carry anything, and tried very hard to talk Melton out of doing so. They argued that their best protection was their noncombatant status.

In turn he insisted that n.o.body was playing by the Geneva conventions and cited at least three occasions in Paris where he'd been forced to defend himself. It was an unresolved dispute, with some of the older hands writing him off as a fossil from the Cowboy Age, while some of the younger ones quietly sought him out to ask his advice about how they might discreetly pack their own protection. It was telling, he thought, that Barry had scrounged him two spare magazines for the Fabrique Nationale Five-seveN pistol.

He stripped, cleaned, and rebuilt the handgun before slotting home a full mag. Safety on, it went into the holster on his right hip and disappeared under the slicker. He finished his packing with a fully charged cell phone, plugged into British Telecom's network and set to roam, but noted that-as usual-there was no signal available. Service was spotty at best. After a quick visit to Monty's cubicle for all the good-byes and good-luck wishes, he signed out at the security desk, lodging a rundown of his expected movements over the next forty-eight hours, the name of the French unit he would be with, and the number of the all-but-useless cell phone in his breast pocket.

From there he hurried out to the internal courtyard where his ride was waiting, a custom-built six-wheeled Land Rover with two armed guards and his driver, American Dave.

"Fantastic," Bret muttered to himself. More loudly, on approaching the vehicle he called out, "Morning! You guys got my route map this morning. We're gonna be skirting around some contested ground."

Dave, a chunky, dark-haired man with a short-cropped beard, continued chewing his gum and nodded. "Yup."

"Okay then. Drive on."

It took them all of four minutes to deviate from the route. Bret had mapped out a long, looping, circuitous path through the district's quieter streets to avoid the fighting between Avenue Foch and the huge traffic roundabout at the Place de la Porte Maillot. Within that area fourteen irregularly shaped city blocks had been reduced to a wasteland of shattered buildings, burning ruins, and rubble through which no armor could pa.s.s and over which thousands of men and women now fought. The rain had dampened hostilities somewhat, but the rolling thunder of combat never completely abated. At one point two jets screamed low overhead to unload their bombs on somebody. The air force was almost entirely behind Sarkozy, but even so, Melton flinched a little. Technically, they were still in Loyalist territory, and an armored Land Rover would make an excellent target of opportunity.

He didn't notice them veering off course because American Dave surprised him by initiating a conversation as he popped a CD into the stereo. Bret checked out the cover. Dave Dudley's Truckin' Hits.

"Gonna git b.l.o.o.d.y, soon," said American Dave.

Okay, it wasn't much of a conversation, but it was a start.

"Yeah," agreed Bret. "Always gets kinda biblical whenever you get a lot of irregulars tangling with main force. These guys'll be desperate, too. You got the marines and tankers coming in from the park, and those two grunt divisions. .h.i.t Romaine and Noisy-le-Sec yesterday. The Loyalists are trapped."

Dave snorted in disgust.

"f.u.c.king Loyalists. Bulls.h.i.t. n.o.body loyal to nothing but Allah ever partnered up with those raghead motherf.u.c.kers."

Melton let that one slide past. He had no idea what game plan the Loyalists were running and wouldn't be surprised to seem them turn on the Arab street fighters and ma.s.sacre them wholesale if the need arose.

The Land Rover rumbled down a deserted street in which all of the trees had died. The rain was still heavy, reducing visibility to about thirty yards, and he could tell from the neglected appearance of the buildings, with gaping broken windows and doors left ajar, that most of them were empty. Every now and then a figure would dart furtively from cover, but only for a few seconds at most. In the back, Dave's companions kept their weapons at the ready.

"You don't think?" said Dave.

"Sorry. I don't think what?"

"You don't think the ragheads and Loyalists are teamed up?"

Melton shrugged.

"They have a common enemy, but that doesn't make them friends or even allies. The Loyalists are fighting Sarkozy because they think he's a dictator. A fascist. The street Arabs from the outer suburbs are fighting him because he sent his troops into their neighborhoods and served 'em up a big bowl of smackdown. The skinheads are fighting them because they're skinheads. The other white gangs are fighting the Arabs because fighting's all there is now. You fight, you eat. You fight, you live. Maybe. Don't know that's there's much more to it."

Dave grunted and lapsed back into silence.

Mr. Dudley started singing that he was the king of the road.

And just out of the corner of his eye, Bret Melton saw the telltale, snaking smoke trail of an RPG round.

A warning cry was in his throat but never got out.

The world turned upside down with a head-cracking roar and a geyser of hot fire.

Seattle, Washington

It was raining, of course. Jed pulled his overcoat a little more tightly around his stout frame as he left the foyer of the Hotel Monaco. The caucus was still running in his suite. It ran 24/7 all week, forcing him to retain another, private room on a different floor. He scowled at the weather and tugged his hat down a bit more smugly, feeling like an extra from a B-grade film-noir feature. There was no avoiding it, though. The temperature had dropped away dramatically as spring succ.u.mbed to a "Disappearance fall," and a wide-brimmed hat was the only way to keep the acidic rain off one's face. For good measure he popped a large black umbrella as he stepped out onto the street. He had a four-block walk in front of him. Only the military and emergency services were getting any gas in Seattle, and they didn't rate Jed Culver's needs high enough to afford him a car and driver.

He rather missed Hawaii.

The Monaco might have been one of the hippest little boutique joints in the world a month ago. Now it was full of rowdy conventioneers and tobacco-chewing soldiers who clomped so much mud through the place that the management had given up attempting to keep the public areas clean, and had instead laid down ma.s.sive canvas tarpaulins everywhere. When Culver left the hotel, he found a quartet of soldiers standing around one of the hotel's carpet-shampoo machines, trying to figure out how it worked. He overheard someone, probably a sergeant, he wasn't sure, saying he wanted to return the place better than they found it when they left.

If they leave, Culver thought as he stepped out into the quiet streets.

Huddled deep inside his coat, he shuffled quickly past an abandoned building site where oily water gathered in pools and dripped from torn plastic sheeting. Some locals had told him it would have been their new library but n.o.body expected it to be finished now. He walked on down Fourth Avenue, with his free hand jammed into a coat pocket. He pressed a leather doc.u.ment wallet up against his body with that arm. He wore thin leather gloves to protect his hands from the burning rain, but even so he preferred to keep them tucked away. The streets were quiet, save for a few city workers who all wore bright yellow ID laminates around their necks, and small groups of soldiers who tried to stay under cover at every street corner. Some managed a little respite under an awning or bus shelter. Those who didn't looked as miserable as Culver had ever seen grown men and women look. His own laminate, which guaranteed his pa.s.sage through downtown, was an embarra.s.sing hibiscus pink, identifying him as one of Governor Lingle's representatives to the convention.

A gust of wind, whipping through the canyons of the city, threw a spray of toxic water into his face, forcing Jed to stop and wipe it down with a handkerchief, one of a collection he carried for just that purpose. He'd stopped outside Simon's Espresso Cafe, where he'd managed to score a quite decent prime-beef sandwich on his first day in the city. But between grousing about the "fascist pig dog maggots" who'd "taken over" the city, and muttering darkly about the secret military experiment that had caused the Disappearance in the first place, his waiter, a life-support system for 392 stainless-steel ringlets, studs, and spears, had warned him to enjoy the dead flesh, as it was one of the last sandwiches Simon's would serve. And sure enough the cafe was soon closed and dark, like most of the retail outlets in the city. As he wiped the stinging water from his face, Jed wondered idly what had happened to the freak with all the piercings.

Probably joined the "Resistance."

He had to laugh at the studied pretension of those losers styling themselves on the French Underground. As bad as things were in Seattle, it wasn't Paris under the n.a.z.is. And when you got down to it, these Resistance idiots were simply making things worse. Every time they hacked a server at Fort Lewis, every time they broke into a food bank to "liberate" the supplies for the "common people," every f.u.c.king time they chopped down a tree or spread small iron spikes on a road to "deny" it to military traffic, they simply made things worse. They weren't achieving anything-a major sin in Jed's book-and they were handing Blackstone one rolled-gold opportunity after another to maintain martial law. What was worse, of course, they played right into the hands of the pinhead lobby that wanted to hijack the convention as the first step in reframing the Const.i.tution, adapting it into something that Ferdinand Marcos or some Argentine general might have approved of in the 1970s.

Still, thought Jed as he shuffled down the road, dabbing away the stinging water on his face, they were an element of the game, another piece on the board, and they could be played, too.

That's why he had contact numbers and encrypted Net addresses for some of the larger cells in his smart phone.

"Hey, buddy. Got a mouthful, did you?"

The lawyer looked up with a start. He had no idea where the man standing beside him had come from. Correction: the soldier standing beside him.

"Sorry, hope I didn't scare you. Ty McCutcheon's the name. Major Ty Mc-Cutcheon. But you can call me Mac, if that suits."

"Uh-huh," said Culver, warily. He felt he'd been put off balance on purpose, but for what reason he wasn't sure.

"I've seen you at the convention," said McCutcheon. "I'm heading up there myself now if you'd like the company. It is kinda lonesome round here at the moment. I feel like the Omega Man some days."

"The what?" asked Culver in a flat voice.

"You know, Charlton Heston? End of the world. Last man alive. A great, great flick. Even with those dumba.s.s hippie vampires. I'm telling you, Jed. They won't ever make 'em like that again."

"No," said Culver, wondering what game this character was into. He scrunched up the damp handkerchief with which he'd wiped off and jammed it deep into a pocket. He could feel the smart phone in there. Loaded with dozens of names and numbers, any one of which could see him hauled in by the military police for extended questioning.

That's how things ran in this city.

"Well, I am headed that way, Captain ... uh ..." Culver knew what the gold oak leaf on McCutcheon's Gore-Tex jacket represented.

"McCutcheon. Major McCutcheon." The man smiled. If he'd taken Jed's calculated affront to heart, he gave no sign of it.

"So you're an army man, then, McCutcheon," said Jed, even though he knew full well that that wasn't the case. Precisely modulated buffoonery seemed to be the appropriate response to this glad-handing mountebank.

"Nope. Air force," said McCutcheon as they continued toward the civic center, cutting across Marion into Fifth Avenue.

"Well, that's all right, too, I suppose," said Culver. "And what threat to national security are you dealing with down here, Major McCutcheon?"

"Oh, I'm just a humble liaison officer, Jed ... You are Jed Culver, right? One of Governor Lingle's people. It's my job to know."

Culver's smile was knowing, but he allowed just a small twinkle of admiration to light up his eyes, too. This guy wasn't half bad. He certainly wasn't nearly as stupid as he pretended to be. It was telling that he'd referenced Culver's official designation as a Hawaiian delegate, and not his more infamous profile as the prime mover behind the "No" lobby, the makeshift alliance opposed to any radical change in the nation's const.i.tutional arrangements.

They turned the corner into Fifth, where a line of trees leading up to the civic center had shed all their leaves and died. The exposed branches called up an image of a witch's hands, clawing at the poisoned sky.

"I suppose the big pink calling card gives me away," he conceded, fingering the laminate for emphasis. He had wondered who'd picked the colors for the laminate cards, which Culver had received when he had arrived two weeks ago. It certainly wouldn't have been his first choice, or Governor Lingle's for that matter.

Jed Culver stopped and turned to face McCutcheon directly. "But what gives you away, Major, is your nonregulation haircut, which is just a bit too close to the collar, your whole hail-fellow-well-met routine, which is a little too practiced at being a little too hip, the small, almost unnoticeable hole in your left earlobe, which tells me that at some point you had something stuck in there, possibly to fit in with some underground cell of Resistance nitwits or anarchist troublemakers. It was a nice save on the name, but I've been dealing with military people for weeks now, and none of them ever call me anything but 'Mr. Culver,' or 'sir.' So why don't you stop trying to jam ten pounds of horses.h.i.t into a five-pound bag and tell me what it is you want?"

McCutcheon appeared to regard him with detached amus.e.m.e.nt. Staying in character, then. Okay, thought Jed, one point for him.

"You're the guy set this gig up, aren't you, Jed?" He smiled, with just a hint of steel in his voice.

"The const.i.tutional convention, you mean?"

"Yeah. The cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k down at the Munic.i.p.al Tower of Babel."

"No. I'm not the one who set it up, Mac. I think you'll find that the executive and legislative branches of the surviving states did that, in accordance with Article Five of the Const.i.tution. I'm just an observer for Governor Lingle's office."

"Bulls.h.i.t. Everyone knows what role you're playing. It's a dangerous game, Jed. Look at this place."

McCutcheon waved a gloved hand at the dead city lying in state around them. "More'n half a million people hunkered down like rats, living on subsistence handouts. An active underground resistance, which is this close to flipping over into major violence, and the only G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing keeping the lid on is martial law. And that's just here. You know what it's like back in Hawaii. You must have heard about the refugee camps down in Chile and Brazil. America isn't a functioning nation anymore. It's a f.u.c.king shambles, which is this close to going under. Do you honestly believe we can afford to indulge ourselves in partisan bulls.h.i.t and self-seeking politics anymore, the whole f.u.c.king spin cycle, red state blue state, inner-outer Beltway psychosis? We are this close to going under."

"No," sighed Jed. "You are this close to giving me a migraine. What are you, McCutcheon? Blackstone's lord chief a.s.sa.s.sin? His witch finder general? What is it exactly that you want from me?"

"It's not what I want from you, Jed. It's what you can do for your ..."

"Oh, please, don't."

Culver turned and resumed his steady stride down toward the convention. He half expected McCutcheon to grab him by the elbow and muscle him into a black van or down an alleyway. But the air force man, if that's what he really was, didn't even bother to follow. He simply called out after McCutcheon, "Room 1209."

It took half a second for the significance to sink in, but when it did, Culver froze, almost comically, nearly pitching forward under his own momentum.

"That's where your family can be found, can't they? Room 1209 of the Emba.s.sy Suites."

It took all of Jed Culver's willpower not to spin around and fly back at McCutcheon. He was still a powerful man, in spite of years of fine living. His wrestler's physique had not run too badly to fat, and at that moment every nerve in his body was singing a high, sweet song of madness. He wanted to tear one of McCutcheon's arms out of its socket and beat him down with it.

Instead, he fixed a small vulpine smile on his face and walked back slowly.

"I don't know who you are, McCutcheon. Who you really are. I don't know what you really want. I'm going to do you the courtesy of presuming that your intentions are honorable and your means, like so much of what is happening in this city, are driven by the devils of necessity. But if you know about me, and what I am, what I've done, you'll know I neither make nor accept threats idly. Our business here today is done. But you and I, my friend, we are not."

And with that Jed Culver turned and walked away, wondering if he should continue with his planned meeting. Could he be under surveillance?

He wondered about McCutcheon's agenda.

It seemed a h.e.l.l of risk, confronting Jed like that. What would happen if he walked up to a news crew at the convention and started bleating about being monstered by a military officer, who had threatened his family?

And then he smiled.

He knew what would happen. McCutcheon would produce half a dozen impeccable witnesses, probably backed up with electronic evidence-say, date-stamped video coverage-"proving" that he had been nowhere near the city at the time Culver alleged. Jed would be ridiculed as a fabulist and possibly as a fellow traveler with the subversives in the Resistance. His effectiveness as a backroom operator would be over.

He nodded in appreciation of the gambit, stopping and turning around.

McCutcheon, of course, was gone.

"You sly sumb.i.t.c.h," muttered Jed. "You're not half the fool you pretend to be, are you, boy?"

He snorted with wry amus.e.m.e.nt and resumed his progress toward the Munic.i.p.al Tower.

His back muscles, clenched against a bullet, only relaxed a block later.

His stash of freeze-dried rations at home was beginning to look mighty good as James Kipper surveyed the buffet in the main convention hall. The military had stocked trestle tables with light tan, plastic-wrapped MREs while a couple of ancient urns, dug out of the city council dungeons, hissed and steamed, providing hot water for powdered coffee. First cup free, then you had to supply your own makings. Kipper ripped open a sachet of army coffee, wondering if the navy's would taste any better. He'd heard that once. Too bad if it did, because the army had a lock on the coffee market in Seattle now.

The air in the hall was hot and cloying. That was his doing. Power restrictions meant that the air-conditioning had to be dialed right back. The lighting had been dimmed, too. Kipper had taken a lot of grief for that decision, but every time some angry state congressman with three-day body odor hara.s.sed him about it he just shrugged and pointed out that the citizens of Seattle were restricted to eight hours of power a day for the foreseeable future. The city engineer made his one free powdered coffee and grabbed an army chocolate bar for his daughter to have later. The soldiers called them track pads, and after sampling one, he could understand why. They were hard as bricks, but they seemed to mollify his little girl. Kip looked at the MREs and tried to figure out which one had either Skittles or M&M's in it. He'd learned that you could never tell.

He was getting ready to make a clean getaway when a Mack truck in an expensive-looking three-piece suit suddenly blocked his way.

"Mr. Kipper, the city engineer?"

Kip kept his face neutral, wondering if he was going to get into trouble for stealing the chocolate bar. As one of the city's senior administrators he had unrestricted access to the conference floor-in case he had to speak urgently to any of the now-released city councillors-but he probably shouldn't have been grazing at the buffet. It had been laid out for the delegates. He palmed the chocolate bar, or attempted to anyway.

"Oh, don't sweat it, son. I have a sweet tooth myself." The suit grinned. "Culver is the name. Jed Culver, with the Hawaiian delegation. And you're James Kipper, aren't you?"

"City engineer, yeah," said Kipper, who felt the need to explain himself. "This, uh, this is for my daughter. She's six and ..."

Culver held up his hand and shook his head.