Channel Blue (32 page)

‘So,’ the bearded man said. ‘How are you feeling today?’

President Grebner shook his head. ‘I’m afraid it’s getting worse.’

‘Please explain.’

‘You remember last week’s hallucination?’

‘Jesus?’

The President nodded. ‘A visitor came to the Oval Office this morning named
Perry Bunt
.’ He waited for something to register on the face of the bearded man. Nothing did. ‘Did you hear me? Perry Bunt.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know the name.’

‘Yes, you do.’ The President waved one hand impatiently. ‘That’s the name the hallucination told me. He said Perry Bunt would have the plan to save the world.’ He pointed at the notebook in the bearded man’s lap. ‘Look back to last week, you must have written it down.’

The bearded man made no move towards the notebook. ‘What do you think this means?’

‘You’re the expert. What the hell does it sound like?’

‘I want to know what you think.’

‘I just met a visitor to the White House using a name given to me by a hallucination. Which means that the visitor was also a hallucination. Which means I’m still hallucinating. Which means the new goddamned drugs aren’t working!’

The bearded man nodded slowly, seemingly oblivious to the President’s state of agitation.

‘I know the situation in the Middle East has taken a toll on you, and when we’re in a fragile state under intense pressure, our minds can play all kinds of tricks on us.’ He stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘Maybe the name of the visitor was Barry Bunt. Or Perry Hunt.’

‘It wasn’t! It was goddamned
Perry Bunt
!’

‘Did you ask him to repeat it?’

‘You expect me to stand there in the Oval Office, talking to a hallucination?’

‘Did his appearance remind you of anyone?’

‘No! He didn’t look like anyone, he didn’t look like anything at all.’

‘And this name has no personal significance to you?’

‘
Perry Bunt
? Are you joking? What significance could that possibly have?’

The bearded man took off his glasses and cleaned them with a tissue. ‘As you know, I’m a man of science. But I also believe there is so much that we don’t know that we have to consider everything.’

‘English, Doctor,’ the President said. ‘I’ve got Jews and jihadis getting ready to incinerate each other; I don’t have time for the graduate seminar.’

‘I’m saying, maybe you have actually had some kind of religious experience.’

The President stared blankly at the bearded man. ‘Are you serious?’

The bearded man shifted in his seat. This was clearly an area he didn’t feel fully comfortable discussing. ‘I know you’ve spoken in interviews about getting advice from God—’

‘Not
literally
, for crying out loud! Jesus doesn’t actually
come to people and tell them what to do
! It would scare the living shit out of them!’ The President looked helplessly around the room. His vitriol seemed to suddenly give way to great sadness. ‘Doctor, what’s happening to my mind?’

‘New medication always takes time to become fully effective. You’re going to be fine, you’ll see. Everything is going to be fine.’

CHANNEL 29

THE TERRORIST

Perry woke to the sound of loud chanting. He sat up, still groggy. He was in a large, windowless cell dressed in an orange jumpsuit. His legs were cuffed to a row of leg shackles bolted to the concrete floor. On both sides and across from him were men in identical orange jumpsuits, shackled just as he was. They had beards and were chanting loudly with their eyes closed, twisting their bodies so that their bowed heads pointed in different directions.

‘
Subhaana rabbiyal Alaa. Subhaana rabbiyal Alaa. Subhaana rabbiyal Alaa
.’

The man to his left was splayed out so that he almost touched him with outstretched arms.

‘
Allahu Akbar
.’

Without moving their shackled feet, the men stood and continued chanting. Perry lay back down, trying to get his bearings. His head was pounding. He stared up at the dim fluorescent light in the ceiling. He shifted his legs to see how much he could move them. Not much, as it turned out – maybe an inch.

The chanting stopped and the room seemed terribly quiet. The man next to him saw that he was awake, and then turned to the man in the row opposite him and said something in a foreign language.

After a few more minutes, a large steel door opened and two soldiers in camouflage entered the cell. They walked down the centre aisle and stopped in front of Perry.

‘Put your hands out in front,’ one of them said. Perry did as he was told. The soldiers put his wrists in handcuffs and locked them, then unlocked his leg shackles from the eyelet in the floor. They lifted him into a standing position and, with a soldier at each elbow, led him shuffling out of the cell.

They passed into a cavernous hallway, also faintly lit by fluorescents. There was more air out there and Perry’s mind slowly defogged.

He was clearly a prisoner of some kind, no doubt as a result of the document he’d left for the President. So basically there was good news and bad news. The bad news: he was being imprisoned without even the pretence of a hearing, meaning that his life was in danger. The good news: he was being imprisoned without even the pretence of a hearing, meaning that his life was in danger. Perry now knew from experience that the viewers of Channel Blue took great pleasure in his misery: Perry Bunt in a secret prison in itself might be enough to keep the finale from taking place. But were they watching? He hadn’t seen any flies since regaining consciousness, but the satellites had to be picking this up. Hopefully Amanda was safe and could put pressure on Marty to air it. It was a thin hope on which to hang the fate of the world, but it was hope. The scene in the White House had in fact moved the plot along. Once again, a story was happening to Perry.
Bunt to the Rescue
was back in production, if not on the air.

The guards took Perry to a smaller cell. At a table in the centre of the room sat two men: one young with a full head of perfectly coiffed hair in an immaculate grey suit, the other old and bald in a red plaid hunting jacket. They watched silently as the guards sat Perry down in a metal chair and locked his leg shackles to the crossbar.

The young man cleared his throat. ‘Dear Mr President,’ he said. ‘The Earth is in imminent danger. Many of these dangers you know about. But there is a danger even more imminent. For the last 150 years, our planet has been watched by a technologically superior alien race as entertainment. They have grown weary of our selfish and war-like ways and have decided to destroy us. This is the root of the current situation in the Middle East. Unless you take immediate action to show these alien viewers that we are capable of acting in a humane way beyond our own self-interest and thus generate their sympathy, we will all be dead within a week. Here are some steps that must be taken immediately—’

The young man paused. From his lap, he held up the document Perry had titled ‘How to Save the World’. ‘Let me start with a compliment. The agent who turned your file over to us has been reading crazy letters to the President for thirty years. He said that with this document you have reset the bar. It is arguably
beyond
crazy. Anyone who reads just one paragraph of it starts getting dizzy. So, operating under the bold assumption that you’re sane enough to understand what I’m saying, you’re probably asking yourself, “Why am I here? All I did was write a crazy letter to the President and walk it into his office. Why aren’t I in some psych ward getting an evaluation before being indicted by a federal grand jury on one felony count of threatening the President of the United States, punishable by five years in prison?”’

Perry shook his head. ‘I didn’t threaten the President.’

The young man returned to the document. ‘
We will all be dead within a week
,’ he read, then smiled at Perry. ‘But all of this is academic. The fact is you won’t be seeing a grand jury any time soon. The reason, not that we have to give you one, is the text that follows what I just read. This text is what makes you a person of substantial interest to us.’

The young man turned a page and read: ‘(1) End all military action. (2) Return all military personnel not involved with humanitarian missions to their families. (3) Divert all military funding not concerned with the National Guard to improve education, nutrition and healthcare in the US and around the world.’ The young man rifled through the pages. ‘And it goes on and on. How did you get into the White House with this?’

‘I walked in.’

‘Why were you trying to give it to the President?’

Perry stared back at him. ‘For the reason I gave in the letter.’

‘And that reason is—?’

‘To save the world.’

The two men at the table exchanged a knowing look – it seemed that Perry had confirmed their worst fears. The young man drew himself erect. ‘Why do you want to destroy this country?’

‘I don’t.’

‘You just said you wanted to save the world.’

‘Our country is part of the world.’

‘But you didn’t mention saving the United States, did you?’

‘I want to save it all!’

‘But your main concern is with saving the world. Yes or no.’

‘Without the world, there’d be no United States.’

‘You believe that.’

‘It’s not a matter of belief,’ Perry said, growing frustrated.

The young man stood holding Perry’s document. ‘The fact is, if the government was to execute even one of your world-saving suggestions, it would destroy our country.’

‘That’s not true.’

The young man flipped through the pages. ‘(38) Work with the United Nations to bring peace to all conflicts.’ He regarded Perry with a smirk of triumph, then flipped to another page. ‘(92) Issue an executive order to provide tax incentives for adopting underprivileged foreign-born children.’ He flipped again. ‘(218) Sell off all non-essential assets of the US government – including the 8139 tonnes of gold buried underground – and use it to feed the poor.’ He glared at Perry. ‘Why not just go over to the Lincoln Memorial and take a big crap in Lincoln’s lap?’

‘The gold’s just sitting there underground,’ Perry said. ‘It’s not doing anybody any good there. We’re not even on the gold standard.’

‘Don’t talk to me about the gold standard!’ the young man yelled and threw himself at Perry, pummelling him with his fists. Perry, stunned by this sudden ferocity, fell over onto the floor, where he lay for several moments before the guards, with seeming reluctance, set his chair upright and pulled him back onto the seat. ‘You don’t know
shit
about the gold standard,’ the young man hissed, still seething.

‘You’re actually right,’ Perry said. ‘I don’t. I just thought it was a valid point, seeing how we have all this gold sitting there under the ground—’

‘Shut up!’ barked the young man, his face now a livid shade of red. He paced back and forth, rubbing his head as if attempting to calm himself. ‘Just... stop talking!’

Perry fell silent. The guy obviously had some serious issues with gold.

‘Listen and learn.’ The young man stopped pacing and turned back to the table. The old man had spoken for the first time. ‘This is the new breed. It’s the worst kind of terrorism, really, this terrorism of the mind.’ The old man gazed intently at Perry with the attention an entomologist might give a rare insect he’d stepped on.

The old man had lived to see many enemies challenge America. But in the fifty-three years he’d spent safeguarding her borders, protecting her from the communists, the revolutionaries, the anarchists and the terrorists, Drummond Nash had run into few operatives as dangerous as he considered Perry Bunt to be. To the elderly spymaster, Perry Bunt was the red flag that warned of a change in the game, the first salvo in a brand new theatre of combat.

This war never failed to surprise the old man. And why shouldn’t it? There was no precedent to serve as a guide. It was a war like no other – unconventional, multilateral and, most of all, endless.

Many were the presidents Drummond Nash had seen daunted by the idea of fighting an interminable war. They were weak and needed to convince themselves it could be won in order to fight it. The old man required no such artificial consolations. No one wanted war, of course, much less a war that goes on forever. Yet there was something deeply exciting to him about the concept of Eternal War. He felt like an expert climber who, in the twilight of his career, had come upon a mountain so massive that it had no discernible peak. How could you not be thrilled by that kind of challenge? It was obvious to him that his entire life of service had led up to this ultimate test. And when you thought about it, Eternal War was a more natural state than the old-fashioned ebb-and-flow of human conflict, when great nations would take breaks between wars to manufacture new weapons and breed new soldiers. If you believed that there existed both good and evil in the world, didn’t it follow that there should be constant conflict between them? What was the value of good and evil if they weren’t eternally bent on mutual annihilation?

Drummond Nash stared at Perry. Here was the eternal enemy’s latest escalation, their latest delivery system, their latest weapon. The detainee clearly wasn’t what you’d call intimidating, powerful, intelligent, strong of character, or even manly for that matter – but that wasn’t the point.

‘Make no mistake, Jerome,’ the old man told his protégé. ‘Evil ideas with a benevolent appearance can turn the minds of a nation’s own citizens against it. And what is a nation, even this one, but a mere
idea
? The do-gooders, the so-called humanitarians, don’t understand how fragile she is. “Just be more humane.” “Just love each other.”’ Drummond Nash shook his massive head with awe and admiration.  ‘Few bombs could do more damage. They’re like viruses, these ideas. They trick minds into accepting them by disguising themselves as
good
and
kind
, then, once inside, take over and wipe out everything else. We had a taste of it in the Sixties, but this here—’ He flapped a large weathered hand in Perry’s direction. ‘This is a whole new strain. With enough operatives like him, the enemy might never need another bomb. Look at him. He’d like to think us into thin air. He’d like to think us right into the shithole with the rest of the world.’ Drummond Nash and the young man glared in silence at Perry, who grew more and more uncomfortable.