Fire (10 page)

Just the same it pained her. Leigh had ambition to be a poet or a novelist or maybe both. Despite that ambition she’d finished neither a single short story nor even a poem in the ten years since she’d left college. Whatever success she had as a writer of warped facts only added bitterness to her failure as a real writer.

A month ago it’d finally occurred to her that there was something childish about getting bitter at her own failure when the essence of that failure was the fact that she needed to sit down and get to work. What she needed to do, she’d decided, was take some time away from the Interlocutor, away from the world, and sit down and write. Vacation was the natural time to do it, but by then she’d already made plans for Moscow. Worse: she’d already made the kind of bargain-rate reservations that can’t be canceled. And she’d already paid for them. That’d been a long, hard, moment — her career as a serious writer pitted inside her against the vacation to Moscow she’d been planning for years, the vacation that’d already cost two months’ pay. And then it’d occurred to her that there wasn’t any reason she couldn’t have both. She had her laptop computer; more than once she’d used it to write up Interlocutor stories on planes or in hotel rooms, stories that she couldn’t get over the phone. You couldn’t get much farther away from the Interlocutor than Moscow, it seemed to Leigh. The paper’s owner, Bill Kerrigan, was a crusty old Reformer who liked to wander around the office lecturing anyone who’d sit still on the virtues of capitalism and the American way.

And certainly if she could write garbage while she traveled — certainly there wasn’t any reason she couldn’t write something serious on that little machine.

That was what she told herself. She hadn’t even started anything on the long plane ride from New York. Hadn’t written a word in the two days since she’d arrived. And here she was in a fashionable hard-currency restaurant called Tovarich, struggling to find a story to write as she ate breakfast at the very table where the First Lady had come down with food poisoning two months before.

There were stories all around her, she thought. None of them were anything she could do justice to.

Over there, two tables away in the direction of the door, was a Pakistani couple — or were they Indian? For that matter, they could be Afghans. No, they had to be Indian. She was berating him quietly, talking to him sternly in low, harsh tones. No Moslem wife could talk to her husband that way. Not if she planned a long life. And the husband (were they married? Leigh thought so, but there was no way to be certain) the husband was this big barrel-chested giant of a man, six-foot-four in his stocking feet if he was an inch, and he looked as much like a small animal cornered and under the lash as a man possibly could while he sat in a chair.

And over there — near the big window by the door. Four men dining alone at small tables. Each of them darker, more furtive, more suspicious than the one beside him. Where am I, she asked herself, a guest at a convention for spies?

That was a story, all right. But what did Leigh know about spy novels? And anyway, spy novels were just thrillers, or mysteries, or whatever they were. They weren’t poetry. No; their story wasn’t the story she wanted to tell.

Sitting beside the wall at the table to her right was another man, a man nothing like the suspicious ones in the front. He was alone, just as each of the others were, but where the others seethed with dark intentions and half-hidden motivations — this man was sad looking. Lonely, even. Leigh felt for him; she had an urge to speak to him, to try to drag him out of whatever it was that put that soulful ache into his eyes. . . . No. She mustn’t do that, she realized after only a moment. The thing that caused that sadness in him was something darker and more dangerous than anything inside the spies.

Spies? Whatever they were. It was the KGB in this country, wasn’t it? An organization like the CIA, the FBI, and some dictator’s secret police, all at once. Those men had to be KGB agents, unless they really were spies from some other country. Which didn’t seem likely; any spy as obvious as those men were would get himself arrested in short order.

The sad-looking man closed the book he’d been reading. Turned to Leigh and looked her in the eye. Had he seen her watching him? She was being obvious herself, she realized. Obviously what? She hoped that no one would mistake her for a spy.

She had to stop thinking like this. She was becoming paranoid as if she were a spy.

“Do you have the time?” the sad man asked. “I think my watch has stopped.”

His accent was American. With the faintest drawl — the kind of accent you hear in the voices of people in southern Indiana.

Which was when it finally occurred to her: That’s what I’d look like. If I were a spy and I didn’t want to be obvious, I’d make myself seem like this man does. And I’d ask questions as innocent as that one. And I’d keep my eyes open, and I’d watch.

She looked at her watch, flustered. It read nine-thirty; for a moment Leigh couldn’t remember whether or not she’d ever reset it to local time. She must have. It looked like nine-thirty in the morning outside. And she was eating breakfast, wasn’t she?

“Half past nine,” she said. “But I wouldn’t set your watch on my say-so if I were you. I’m still not sure which day it is.”

The man smiled, and when he did most of the sadness seemed to fall away from him. “Oh, it’s Friday morning, all right. No question about that.”

He was a story, Leigh decided. Just not any story she wanted to tell. Something down in her gut told Leigh that telling this man’s story would be a powerful and unwelcome intrusion.

A waiter came by, refilled her coffee, refilled the man’s. When he was gone the man reached out, extended his hand to Leigh. She hesitated only a moment before shaking hands with him.

“I’m Jack Hightower,” he said. “Here on business from Cincinnati. Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise. Leigh Doyle. Here on vacation from White Plains. In Westchester, north of New York City.”

The man cocked an eyebrow. “Vacation? Here and now? You are one brave lady.”

Leigh smiled. “I like to think so.”

The man pursed his lips. He looked worried — too worried to be a spy. “Did you manage to catch the news this morning?” And suddenly it occurred to Leigh that there was no way he could be a spy. No spy could ever look that worried. Not over a question that simple. “Is the President still talking like a lunatic?”

What? The President talking like a lunatic?

Leigh made her living reading and reworking news, but she didn’t tend to concern herself overmuch with the kind of news you find in the headlines; the front page was the one part of the papers that didn’t concern her directly. It was the one part of the paper she could afford to ignore, and she ignored it with a passion born of reading too much copy.

The only news she could ever remember having read for pleasure, in fact, was very old news indeed. A year ago she’d picked up a hardcover collection of Hemingway’s dispatches from the Spanish civil war — back in the thirties. Beautiful stuff, Leigh thought. More like stories than they were like news reports. If all news were written like that she might even get a measure of satisfaction from her work. None of it was, of course. No one wrote like Hemingway. And no one in the papers even tried to.

Every once in a while her ignorance caught up with her in the worst possible way. Leigh had a sudden sinking feeling that this was just such a time.

The truth was, of course, that her situation was much worse than that. In fact, it was even worse than the warnings of her friends. People had kept telling her that this was no time when anyone in her right mind ought to be taking a vacation in Russia. She’d ignored them, of course. Most of her friends were Reformers. They always talked like that about Russia.

“No,” she said, “I didn’t manage to catch the news. What’s the latest you’ve heard?”

“I ran into someone from the Embassy on my way here,” he said. His voice was very quiet. “The President’s declared a state of unlimited nuclear emergency.”

A phone rang somewhere not too far away. Somewhere over in the direction of the kitchen.

Unlimited nuclear emergency.

The man was planning to start a nuclear war. And here Leigh was, on the wrong side of the shooting gallery.

I should have gone to Australia this year. I knew it. Knew it.

That was when it finally began to occur to Leigh exactly what the story was she had to tell. Just a moment before the five KGB agents at the front of the restaurant got up and crossed the room and took her and the sad-eyed man into custody.

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They took Leigh and the sad-faced man in a great, dark car that looked like a limousine from the nineteen-fifties. Two of the KGB men came with them, and all the while as they drove quickly through the twisted Moscow streets they kept their guns leveled at Leigh’s heart. And at Jack Hightower’s.

The guns didn’t shake Leigh, because she did not see them. Not for more than a moment. She saw only the streets and structures that were the city of Moscow. And beyond the city she saw her world, balanced at the edge of war and self destruction.

And she thought of Hemingway.

How would he see this?
she asked herself. What would Hemingway write if he were here and now, writing dispatches from the front lines of a war that was everywhere in the world all at once?

When she held herself still and quiet as she could, Leigh thought that she could hear his voice. Writing the story of the world she lived in; telling the tale of the city of Moscow poised at the edge of thermonuclear annihilation.

They took her and the sad-eyed man to a barracks somewhere in a high, wide-windowed building. And left them there with a hundred other Americans. Others, too; Germans, British, French. She hardly noticed any of them; she went directly to the window, where she stood and watched and listened for hours.

Until it grew dark.

And then she looked around her, and saw that sometime during the day someone had brought the bags she’d left in her hotel room into the barracks that was their prison. She went to them, took her laptop computer from its case, and wrote the story that she’d heard all day.

It wasn’t Hemingway, and Leigh knew that it wasn’t, but all the same it was work she was proud of. And right there at the end of the world that was all that was necessary.

When she was done she saw that their jailers had supplied them with phones, and saw from the fact that most of them were in use that the phones were working.

And because the story that had told itself to her cried desperately to be told as soon as it possibly could, she called the office of the Interlocutor, back in White Plains, and used her computer to send the story to them over the telephone wire.

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Chapter Six

IN TRANSIT BY AIR OVER THE SOUTH-CENTRAL UNITED STATES

Luke woke briefly near Memphis, when the pilot spoke through the plane’s intercom. There was trouble in Memphis, he said, and in St. Louis. The plane wouldn’t land in either city; instead, it would continue on to Kansas City — this flight’s ultimate destination. The airline would either find new connections for those passengers not bound for Kansas City, or put them up until connecting flights could be arranged.

The whole idea was too much for Luke to cope with, and he couldn’t do anything about it anyway; he tucked his head deeper into the seat-back’s padding and pushed himself down again toward sleep.

Before he was asleep he heard the plane’s two stewardesses gossiping in the aisle a few rows back from him. The first said that the pilot had told her that there was rioting in the Memphis and St. Louis airports, and that that was why they couldn’t land. The second asked her how she was going to get home, and what she was going to do, and where she was going to stay. There was a long gap — for a moment Luke thought they’d stepped back out of earshot — and then the first asked the second what it even mattered where they went, and if there was going to be any home to go to in the morning anyway.

Luke would have shuddered at the thought of riot-torn airports, but the whiskey was too warm, and the sleep was too comforting and seductive. Worrying over his immediate future would have meant waking and clearing his head, and there was no sense in that, none that he could see, so he closed off his mind and hid from the trouble that pursued him — hid from it in his dreams.

The next time he woke there was no way to hide.

The plane was somewhere over the Ozarks, he thought; those looked like low, time-worn and rounded mountains down below him, though in the moonless darkness it was impossible to be certain. Luke was sweating, and cold. The whiskey had worn off, or at least worn thin. His body hurt and his head hurt and there was a demanding queasiness in his stomach. All of that could be the effects of hangover and tension. But those things wouldn’t have woke him, not by themselves. Luke was a heavy sleeper — he’d slept through worse more than once in his life.

No, it was something else that had woke him. Something like the foreboding he’d felt since the clerk at the Blue Mountain Airways desk had found the flight for him . . . like that foreboding, but much more immediate and intense.

Something was happening. Something powerful and inevitable. Unstoppable.

Luke Munsen wasn’t a man given to visions or premonitions; the idea of such things, even in others, was preposterous to him. Nonetheless he knew, impossibly, that the end of the world as he knew it was at hand.

Knew to look west-northwest out the window beside him, and watch the state of Kansas out beyond the horizon. Knew, five minutes later, to shield his eyes from blinding-glowing radiation as he saw the first flicker of light like a distant, tiny sun.

A nuclear explosion, turning three hundred square miles of Kansas wheatfield into vapor and a deep, magma-lined pit.

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Chapter Seven

WASHINGTON

It was midnight when President Paul Green went to the situation room. In all the months since he’d taken office that room had never been empty at any hour of the day or night.