Without Warning Part 52

"What about it, Kip?" Barney Tench implored. "You saved this city once. You can save your country if you act right now."

"Come on, honey," added Barbara. "You know what's right."

Kipper turned back and gazed out of the window.

The crowd looked to be hundreds of thousands strong. He could see them bunched up at the bottleneck of Faben Point, a great ma.s.s of people emerging from the suburbs. He could see a similar crowd heading over the Evergreen Point Bridge to the north.

Phones began to ring all over the floor, as voices rose in confusion, surprise, and even awe. His secretary, Rhonda, came bustling down the hallway and into the room with Suzie trailing behind her. She looked surprised and delighted.

"Barney!" she cried out. "And Barb!"

"Hey, Ronnie."

"Hiya, Ron."

His secretary turned her attention back to Kipper and said, "I'm sorry, Jimmy, but it's General Blackstone's office on the phone. They desperately need to talk to you and the other department heads. What should I tell them?"

Kipper smiled.

One Day

The killer awoke, to find a stranger by her bed.

No, not a stranger, the guy who had saved her. The civilian in the room on the top floor. She could see him clearly now, as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes.

"Where am I?" asked Caitlin, her voice cracking in her dry throat.

"London," said the man. "A special hospital. They had to operate on you."

"My friend the tumor," she said. "Don't tell me he's gone."

The man shrugged.

"I'm not a doctor, so I don't know. Or a relative, so they won't tell me."

"Who are you?"

"Name's Melton," he said. "Bret Melton."

Caitlin tried to lever herself up but found that she had no strength in her arms at all.

"Well, Bret Melton, thank you for saving my sorry a.s.s. And to think I might have popped a cap in yours."

He seemed to take that without offense.

"You probably saved mine, Miss Mercure. I holed up in that joint after my vehicle got hit by an RPG. I was pretty much out of it, just trying to get as far away from the street as possible. If those guys had been even half competent they'd have checked and found me unconscious up top. Probably would have cut my head off."

"Probably," she agreed. "And my name's not Cathy Mercure, by the way. That's a cover. I'm sorry they felt the need to tell you that. My name is Caitlin."

Melton took that without obvious concern, too.

"In my experience," he said with a half smile, "ladies who sneak into snake pits and twist the heads off vipers can pretty well call themselves whatever they feel like. You should know, by the way, that I'm a reporter. I'm not going to write about you. Not even going to ask what went down in that house. They made me sign a piece of paper says I lose my nuts if I do. But I just wanted to get that out there for you."

Caitlin felt a wave of la.s.situde steal through her body. She was aware of great damage that had been done.

"Thank you, Bret," she said weakly. "But it's all right. I'm retired now, a lady of leisure, as of two minutes ago."

"Okay then." He nodded and they lapsed into silence. Her eyelids fluttered heavily, and she felt herself drifting back toward sleep.

"Bret," she said. "Did they get him? Did they get my guy?"

His voice seemed to come from far away.

"I don't know, Caitlin. They got a lot of guys."

She forced her eyes open.

For the first time she noticed the window off to the side of her bed. It opened onto a garden scene, although the trees were leafless and the gra.s.s had all died off.

"What are you going to do, Bret?" she asked. "Will you go home?"

He shrugged.

"I don't know."

She started to fade out again.

"Me neither."

One Week

They buried their dead according to whatever beliefs the departed had lived by. Gathered on the heavily damaged boat deck at the stern of the Aussie Rules, the surviving pa.s.sengers and crew said their prayers or quiet goodbyes for friends and loved ones who hadn't made it. Jules had never known Fifi or Pete to be in the slightest way religious, but in tidying Fifi's quarters in the days after the last battle, she found an old Gideon's Bible, stolen from a motel somewhere, annotated by her lost friend's large, childlike script. The story of Noah and his ark had come in for a lot of attention.

That's just like us, except for all the animals, she had written.

And, Please Lord, smite that a.s.shole Larry Zood was followed in a different ink by d.a.m.n! This prayer s.h.i.t really works!

It was evidence of a secret, inner life Jules would never have imagined of Fifi, and she asked Miguel to add a few Hail Marys to the endless rosaries his extended family were sending skyward for old Adolfo, the only casualty their party had suffered. Dead of a heart attack a full day after the gunfight.

"Hail Mary, mother of G.o.d, blessed art thou and blessed be the fruit of thy womb Jesus ..."

Granna Ana smiled and nodded sadly at Jules and then the two bundles that had been her friends, and she realized that Miguel's family, who had been praying in Spanish, had changed to English without her noticing. Granna Ana waved a thin brown hand at Pete and Fifi's bodies, indicating that the change was for their sake. An earlier, more cynical Jules would have reflexively smirked and rolled her eyes at the idea of an omniscient G.o.d needing a translation, but now, all alone, on a morning that was bright and cold, she let tears come freely as the age-old prayer to the mother of Jesus was whipped away on a freshening southerly breeze.

The sea state had dropped to long, rolling swell, and only a few wisps of cirrus cloud spoiled an otherwise perfect sky. Eight bodies lay wrapped in sheets and blankets on the large, bullet-pocked diving platform at the stern. Fifi and Pete she had placed there herself, the last two bundles on the starboard side, with a lot of help from Shah and Pieraro. The gravity and sorrow of the moment was undercut somewhat by the frozen stiffness of Pete's remains. He'd been lying in the largest of the galley freezers for more than a month, and Jules wasn't sure she'd have been able to contemplate moving him had Shah and Mr. Lee not helped.

"Mr. Pete, he would have loved this," said Lee, as they struggled with his body. "Would have laughed his gweilo a.n.u.s right off, yes."

And he would have, thought Jules, with a private smile and an involuntary hitching sob.

Fifi, though, she would have been p.i.s.sed. Of all of them, Jules thought her friend had most easily dealt with everything that had happened. Perhaps because she had been alone and fighting for herself most of her life. Mute and numb, staring at the inert swaddle of sheets in which the redneck princess lay, Jules could not but indulge herself in a small, bitter moment of self-loathing. If she had been smarter, if she had in any way been worthy of the trust that everyone had placed in her, Fifi would still be with them. Still grinning and shining and lighting up the face of everyone who encountered her.

"... Holy Mary, Mother of G.o.d, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen ... Hail Mary, mother of G.o.d ..."

She was shaking. A slight tremor at first that she didn't really notice until it had spread through most of her body. She shivered inside her thick, dark oilskins, and her throat felt so tight she could not swallow. Beside her, the Gurkhas quietly sang a funeral song for their fallen comrades, Thapa and Birendra, that seemed to magnify the power of the Mexicans' rosary chant. Her American pa.s.sengers mumbled along, all of them except for the banker Moorhouse, who lay on the diving platform next to Birendra, shot down after saving her life during the battle. His mistress, the b.o.o.b job, as Fifi once called her, had found a black c.o.c.ktail dress somewhere for her mourning outfit, creating an incongruous effect under a yellow rain slicker. She dabbed at dramatically running mascara, but, regarding her from within the depths of her own misery, Jules thought she was going through the motions of grief, rather than its reality. The presence of Jason's hand ma.s.saging her a.r.s.e to help her over the trauma did detract somewhat from the air of decorous remembrance she was trying so hard to create. She had already moved cabins to take up with the trust-fund delinquent, much to the chagrin of his sister Phoebe, who was now refusing to talk with him.

Jules sighed at the petty, meaningless nature of it all.

You would think that people could put aside all of the silly wretchedness and just pull together, but no. They couldn't. Her father would have said it simply wasn't in their nature. He was an old villain, there was no denying that. But in his own strange way he had a good heart, and he never stole from anyone who couldn't afford it. There was even a spark of n.o.blesse oblige in him, and he made sure that all of his children were raised to think of themselves as no better than anyone else, because as he so often told her "in the end, Julianne, we were all just as bad as each other."

"Miss Jules."

Lee's voice in her ear dragged her out of these reveries.

"It is a warship, Miss Jules. On the radio. From New Zealand."

She excused herself with a brief hand on Shah's arm, turning and leaving the funeral scene, secretly glad not to have to witness the dumping of the bodies into the deep.

"He wishes to speak with our captain," said Lee, who had contented himself with just a few private words over the bodies of his comrades before everyone came together for the ceremony.

Our captain, thought Jules. How risible.

"What does he want?" she asked.

"Oh, it is nothing bad. I have told him we have Uplifted Americans on board. He asks if we need a.s.sistance, and whether we will be berthing in Auckland or proceeding to Sydney."

"Okay, thanks, Lee."

She stopped before climbing the stairs up to the next deck.

"What do you want to do, Lee? When we get there. They probably won't let us keep this boat, you know. It's not ours."

Her one surviving friend shook his head sadly.

"No. They will not, Miss Jules."

"You can't go home. Indonesia is a G.o.dawful mess now."

"Yes, miss."

"So what will you do?"

He looked completely lost for the first time ever.

"What will you do, Miss Jules? Maybe I could come, too."

"I don't know, Lee. These last few weeks, they've really taken it out of me. I don't want to go home, I know that much. England looks nightmarish right now. A giant b.l.o.o.d.y jail if you ask me. Not at all the sort of place for the likes of us."

"No, miss. Foreign Johnnies not welcome anymore."

She started the long climb up toward the bridge, stopping just once to look back toward the stern and say her last good-bye. From here, against the vastness of the southern ocean, her little group of seafarers and survivors looked so vulnerable and sad. Like the last people on earth.

But at least they still lived.

Daddy would have been proud, she thought.

He'd have been so proud of her, for bringing the ship and all of these people home safe, wherever that might turn out to be.

"Don't worry, Lee," she said. "We'll muddle through."

One Year

The president of the United States was hunkered down over a small mountain of paperwork in the Oval Office of the Western White House. Of course, it wasn't oval-shaped at all, but he felt it important to retain a link with the past, something to give people hope that they might be able to reclaim some of the advantages and even a fraction of the glory that the past had once gifted them as a nation.

He read the summation of the reports from the high-energy physics lab into the latest investigations of the Wave, but they all boiled down to the same thing.

n.o.body knew s.h.i.t.

He leaned back and rubbed at his eyes. His chief scientist and national security advisor waited quietly on him, as they sat in the bright yellow armchairs arranged in front of his desk. He had no idea from where the governor of Washington had retrieved them, just before he "gave up" his accommodations for the needs of the federal government, but they were suitably hideous. A parting f.u.c.k-you of exquisite eloquence.

"So, no change," said the president.

"No."

"Not in the slightest, sir," they agreed.