Alternities (17 page)

The little brown and yellow pouch had been sent back to him as a gift by the stationmaster of the Blue Section gate. Tackett was doubly grateful for the gift, since Turkish tobaccos—of any grade—were impossible to get locally.

He set the pipe aside when the phone rang. “Good morning, sir. I should advise you before you say anything that this line is no longer scrambled, though it is shielded. Marian was having trouble dealing with the scrambler.”

“That should be fine for our purposes, Albert, I hope you’re enjoying your life of leisure, up there on that seaside estate of yours.”

“I do what I can.”

The President chuckled. “You work too hard, Albert. But since you’re working for me. I’m not going to tell you that.”

“Mum’s the word. Have you made a decision. Mr. President?”

“Yes. It’s Alternity Blue. For logistical reasons, I wanted to stay with a domestic gate. Blue was by far the better of the two options.”

Blue—the Indianapolis gate. “I think that’s a reasonable choice, sir. We should be able to control the environment there.”

“What is your station strength in Blue?”

“Eighty-five people. It’s our second-largest station.”

“I don’t see how that can possibly be adequate to the demands of moving more than a hundred Alpha List personnel across and servicing their needs.”

“It’ll stress our financial resources more than our personnel resources. We’re going to have to pump more money across. Which means Treasury will have to increase either the size or the frequency of those currency ‘test’ runs.”

“If so, it’ll be taken care of. But we’re going to need more bodies. I want a commitment from you to double the size of the Blue staff in the shortest possible time.”

“Double—”

“As an initial step. If time allows, we’ll build from there.”

“I can’t qualify another eighty-five people for the Guard in anything less than three months. Not on top of our need to replace losses and program our current growth plan. And even three months won’t qualify them as moles.”

“Then borrow them internally, from the other Sections. This has first priority, Albert. You’ve got fifty-one hundred people on payroll. If you can’t find eighty-five that are being underused where they are—”

“Most of those fifty-one hundred are working on this side of the gate. Technology Transfer. Ops. Analysis. Not covert agents. And an awful lot of them are just plain too old. We can’t send Common World people across, no matter how great the need. Alpha List poses enough problems for us.”

“Albert, I don’t understand your resistance.”

“Sir, this has the potential to disrupt operations in every Section. We’re going to have to hit the runner pool, hard. Probably pull people in from everywhere, and you’ve already told me I can’t close Red Section. We’re going to be green all over once the Chinese fire drill is done.”

“Are you saying you can’t do it?”

“No, sir. I’m saying I think it doesn’t need doing.”

“Noted. I want it done anyway. You’re going to need a lot of horses just to pull detailed bios on the full Alpha list.”

“I didn’t realize that would be necessary.”

“It is. Find the extra bodies, Albert. Clear?”

“Clear, sir.” Tackett hesitated. “Can I ask you about another matter, sir?”

“Of course.”

“Senator Endicott has asked me to have another woman snatched outworld and turned over to him—”

“Problem?”

“Do we have to do this? It seems to me that there should be some limit—”

“Do it,” Robinson said simply.

“He presumes a lot on your friendship.”

“He’s drawing on an account. We owe him.”

Tackett sighed. “One way and another, I’d have thought we’d already paid him ten times over for what little service he did us.”

“What yardstick are you using? Everything the Tower’s given us—you know the list better than anyone—we owe to him.”

We earned that ourselves, Tackett fumed silently. The kids downstairs bought it for us. All Endicott did was giftwrap a white elephant. It wasn’t worth a damn until he gave it to us.

“What’s he do with them, anyway?”

“Do I have to tell you at your age what a man does with a woman?” The President chuckled.

Tackett was not amused. “Men I understand. Leeches are another matter. I wish you’d cut him loose.”

“A convenient brain tumor, perhaps, and a quiet death in Walter Reed?” Robinson chuckled again. “It’s a little thing, Albert, what he asks. Hold your nose and do it. Save your worrying for the big problems. Like putting things in order in Blue. Your personal attention, now, understand? Rathole is one piece in a bigger picture. I want it there when everything comes together.”

“Understood, sir.”

After he hung up, Tackett sat in the chair scowling for long minutes. The pipe was cold, but he did not bother to relight it. The aftertaste had already turned acid in his mouth. Finally he reached for the phone.

“Bret, this is the old man,” he said with a touch of weariness. “Director’s briefing in one hour. Call in the team. We’ve got work to do.”

Even at 7:00 a.m., the Medford-City Center flesh-hauler was full. Full of people trying hard not to look at each other. Full of people withdrawn inside cocoons of myopic blindness.

Pairs of strangers shared benches, each pretending they were alone. They studied their reflections in the window, scrutinized the papers on their laps, glanced up at the advertisements on the ceiling—anything but look at each other with more than a furtive, suspicious glance.

Wallace was the exception. Spoiled by the company vans, he wanted to share a joke, a grin, a few words of idle chatter. He wanted the dark-haired woman across the aisle and two rows back to look up from her poem cards, bright rectangles of floral color, so he could tell her in a moment of eyes meeting how attractive he thought she was.

Most of all he wanted something to keep his mind off the double-edged anxiety that went with returning to work. His own problems had been bad enough; what Jason told him Saturday night was worse.

But the bus was full of strangers. Even those that had gotten on with him at the Block had been strangers—science faculty from MIT and Harvard, execs from the Navy shipyard, junior surgeons from Chelsea and Memorial. Neighbors, but strangers, belonging to circles which had no intersection with his own, their faces as cold as the rest. Even after two years, it had the power to make Wallace feel like a new and not particularly welcome arrival to the city.

But the fact that he was feeling that way this morning was his own doing. He could have lingered at home and taken the company van at his scheduled time. But troubled dreams had opened his eyes a dozen times through the night and finally driven him from bed before even Katie was stirring. Thinking about them when awake, sitting alone in the kitchen, only gave them more power. Talking about them to Ruthann was impossible.

But then, talking to Ruthann had not been an option for a long time. They had come to Boston united, three as one, and silence had divided them. Silence promised with an oath and bought with pale blue checks drawn on the U.S. Treasury.

He shared nothing of his time away, not trivia, not triumph, not fear, not failure. Ruthann and Katie lived in one world, and he moved back and forth between it and his own, the maze of the city linking and dividing them, an ironic echo of the task which took him away from them. The secrets weighed heavy, the silence thundered in his ears. It was easier now to be away.

Work was the antidote. Four days away from the Tower was three too many. A sweetheart run to a downhill gate, that’s what I need, he thought as the tandem bus bumped and swayed its way along Mystic Valley Parkway past anonymous plants and warehouses labeled only with large black numerals. It’s Jason’s boogeyman, not mine.

Except that in his dreams, Jason’s shadow had been a Philadelphia cop named Chambers, and it was Wallace he was looking for.

Ordinarily, there was no special rush at the assignment desk on Monday morning. Continuous operations and overlapping duty shifts served to spread the constant parade of runners and ferrymen through the regular Guard’s eighteen-hour operational day.

But when Wallace reached the duty room just before eight, he found the desk triple-staffed, with a line waiting for each dispatcher. The room was almost as full of rumors as people. By the time he made it to the front of the line, Wallace had heard several: that Red Section was closed, that Red Section was being expanded, that the Guard was being cut back, that Security was going to rescreen everyone from Tackett on down.

“Wallace, Rayne. 21618,” he said. “Any of what’s buzzing true, Bo?”

Declining the chance to serve as a rumor clearinghouse, the dispatcher ignored the question. “Wallace, Rayne,” he repeated, scanning down his list. “You’re out of the rotation.”

“What?”

“You’re to report to the clinic first thing to get your medical release. Then you’re scheduled to see the deputy director at 10:10. Do you know where his office is?”

“See Monaghan?”

“That’s right.”

“Uh—somewhere up in Ops, I suppose.”

“Take any of the east elevators to the twenty-sixth floor. Turn right and check in with the receptionist at the end of the hall. Got it?”

“Got it—”

The dispatcher was already looking past him to the next runner. Out of the rotation—what does that mean? God, don’t let it mean they’ve pulled my papers. Not now. I’d never get back on Annie’s good side. Damn it, I didn’t do anything wrong!

Deputy Director Bret Monaghan was a whippet of a man, looking out at Wallace with squinty eyes from behind wire-frame glasses. His jacket was already on the back of his chair, and his shin sleeves were rolled up one turn, revealing a few inches of freckled forearm and a black-banded watch with a badly scarred crystal.

To Monaghan’s right, on one corner of the desk, a neglected cigarette consumed itself silently in an ashtray, tiny smoke tracings climbing skyward until the current from the vent scattered them. Behind him on the wall, a reproduction of Diego’s stark “Cape Prince of Wales, Twenty-Four Degrees Below Zero” reflected as glare the light from Monaghan’s desk lamp.

Wallace waited as patiently as he could while Monaghan made notes on a tablet, most likely about his last visitor. Monaghan’s schedule was so tight that Wallace had shared the waiting area with two other runners, so tight that the cushion of the one spare chair in Monaghan’s office had been warm when Wallace settled on it.

While he waited, he wrestled with problems to come. So I lose my Red papers, drop to Grade 2. Probably won’t have to leave the Block. Have to sell our share of the Spirit. Shouldn’t be hard, in the Block. No new couch. Annie won’t like that. Won’t like any of it. Won’t understand and I can’t tell her. Goddamn it all.

At long last, Monaghan tucked the sheet of paper inside a file and relegated the file to the credenza behind him. With the veined hands of someone twenty years older, the deputy director slowly shuffled through his papers to find the folder with Wallace’s name on it.

“Doctor blue-stamp you?” Monaghan said at last, without looking up.

“Yes, sir.”

“Looks like you had yourself quite a time over in Red last week.”

Wallace did not know whether to minimize it or brag, so he said nothing.

“You all right between the ears?”

“Sir?”

“How do you feel about running?”

“I’m ready to get back in the chute. More than ready.”

“You like it?”

Casually as they were being asked, the questions were throwing Wallace off-balance. “It’s an honor to serve in the Guard, sir. I’m glad to be here.”

Monaghan looked up from his paper, his eyes seeking Wallace’s like a marksman sighting on a target. “So you don’t like it.”

Why is everyone trying to trap me in my own words? Wallace thought desperately. “I didn’t say that. I like it. It needs doing. I want to make a contribution.”

“You do?”

“Yes, sir.” He hesitated, then plunged on. “There aren’t many chances to do that back in Indiana, where I’m from. My older brother works track gang for a National Rail maintenance crew. That’s about the closest any of the family got.”

“I see you were in the Youth Defense Reserve in school. Why didn’t you go on into the service? Lose your taste for it?”

After all the interviews Wallace had endured during the selection process, it was a familiar question. He’d learned quickly that the real answer was too complicated.