Firechild (8 page)

“I have news all of you must hear.”

“Keep it brief,” Kneeland muttered. “The White House staff’ will be expecting me.”

“The White House can wait.” Clegg stood silent for a moment as if to organize his thoughts. His voice, when he went on, had begun to ring with with oratoric overtones. “Gentlemen, in this grave emergency, I want you to recall the noble Roman whose name we honor. I want you to remember why we call ourselves Catonians.”

He paused to scowl forbiddingly at Kneeland’s sullen headshake.

“Founding the club, we pledged our lives—and our sacred honor, gentlemen, if you recall our oath—to defend a precious legacy. We—the founders of the club— stand among the privileged best of a nation God has favored greatly.

“As Americans now, standing in the shadow of Armageddon but looking back across a magnificent past, we are the fortunate inheritors of four great millennia. Heirs to all that priceless legacy we call civilization. The faith of the Jews and the word of Christ. The glory of Greece and the splendor of Rome and the best of all the ages since.”

Kneeland moved restlessly, looking at the door.

“Gentlemen,” that solemn chant rolled on, “this dark moment has to make us all aware that our noble national heritage has fallen into desperate danger—a danger most of us have long foreseen. Our precious America has long been in danger from the foul decay of faith, from the corruption of democracy, from liberalism and Marxism and a hundred other idiotic delusions. Through decades of moral rot, everything we cherish has been sinking into gathering peril from all the hordes of apish fools rising up to riot and strike and fight for rights they never earned.

“Unless we act at once, with resolute vigor and every resource we can command, this last chapter—this gene-spawned terror spreading out of Enfield—can be the end of us and everything we love.”

He stopped to shake his lean-boned head at Kneeland.

“We are banded together as the world’s last best hope, sworn to defend the sacred temple of mankind, to rescue and preserve the precious faith and wisdom that have made us what we are, to give our fortunes and our lives if need be to insure the safe survival of that holy heritage that can erase the ancient curse of Cain.

“That is our holy mission. To defend that precious legacy that can transform the savage animal—the untamed creature that comes from the womb—into the statesman, the scholar, the minister of God. We founded the Catonians because we know that miracle can be wrought, acting in faith that we are chosen to perform it. This demon raging out of Enfield has come sooner than we had foreseen, its guise more dreadful. Even now, however—if you will trust my leadership— we still have a chance.

“Because we are not naive. We have read the lessons of history and gathered the reins of power. Even now, here in the shadow of terror, with luck enough we can hope to avoid the fatal blunders that have always trapped those misguided leaders of the past who have tried and always failed to gather up and patch the fragments of toppling democracies. Democracies rotting and falling, as they all rot and fall, because they are finally infected with the virus of mobology.”

Kneeland turned in his chair, frowning a silent question at the editor. The editor shook his head.

“Look at the list!” Clegg boomed on. “Look at Alexander and Caesar and Napoleon and a thousand others, even down to Hitler. All caught in the same dilemma, trapped between the mobs and their own grand designs. To hold the mobs behind them, they had to wage foreign wars. Victorious or not, they wasted their nations and the nations around them, and they died by violence.

“Our own hazards are the same. Those mobs would murder us gladly if they had any hint of what we are and what we plan. That’s why our oath of secrecy must be enforced so sternly. We have chosen a safer strategy than the best of our famous predecessors—and we must hold to it, gentlemen, even under this threat of genetic doom. Our control can be firm as any emperor’s, but we must use it with skill and caution.

“We Catonians must remain invisible. Our rule must be through indirection, through all our means of influence, through our command of money and the media, through electronics and psychology, through a shrewd control of proxy politicos who must never know they’re proxies—not even those few unfortunates we may have to sacrifice.

“Okay, Gus?” He swung to challenge Kneeland. “Are you with us?”

“Of course I am!” Kneeland’s voice rose testily. “But you’ve got to remember where I am. Most of you are free to act. I serve two masters—”

“You swore an oath!”

“I’ll keep it. The Catonian Plan will always come first. But I should tell you that my other master has grown new teeth. In this emergency, the President wants total discipline. It isn’t martial law—not for us and not quite yet. But he was close to panic when he got us together in the Oval Room early this afternoon.

“Can you blame him?” Kneeland moved as if to rise. “Suspecting everybody. The Russians. The Puerto Ri-cans. The revived Weathermen. Determined to hush up the crisis till we know what’s going on. If there’s any news leak from official sources, he threatens to have his Secret Service people run the new omnigraph on everybody and shoot suspects without further trial.” His Adam’s apple rose and fell. “I’m in danger, revealing even that.”

“We’re all in danger.” Clegg shrugged. “Thank you, Gus, for your update on that chaos in the executive branch. Fortunately, we Catonians are in a better situation. The difference is that they’re trapped and helpless in their ignorance and indecision, while we know what to do. We’re going to do it.”

He swung to face the group with an air almost of triumph.

“Gentlemen, I have spoken to the President since that session in the Oval Room, and I was able to cool his panic. Slightly, anyhow. I doubt that many of you know that he has always been a secret Catonian. He has agreed to let us activate Plan Black Cat.”

The men around the table stirred, exchanging puzzled glances.

“A top secret plan,” he told them. “Developed by our Inner Council. An executive program designed to call up our resources for emergency action. As you are all aware, we do have resources. We have members in the military and the major corporations. People with money. People in the laboratories. We have Bioscience Alert. We have—”

Kneeland was squinting at his watch.

“Hold it, Gus. Just a moment more.” Clegg paused again, staring away at something beyond the old mahogany walls and the tall shelves of never-read Victorians. His deepset eyes came back to Kneeland, his tone harshly accusing. “You need to hear this, Gus, because you’ve let those fools at Enfield open the gates of hell. In spite of all your stonewalling, it’s clear enough that you’ve conspired with those fools in the Pentagon to let this demon out of hell.

“In plainer English, that devil’s crew at EnGene has stolen God’s secret power of creation and abused it to create a monstrous weapon. I warned them, a year and more ago. In their Satanic arrogance, they ignored me. Now most of them are doubtless dead.

“And we Catonians are going into action.”

He waited until all their eyes were on him.

“I have been recalled from retirement with the rank of brigadier general to mobilize and command Task Force Watchdog.” His voice rang with the sheer joy of new authority. “The President has assured me of total support from every arm of government. It should interest you, Gus, to know the true purpose of that conference call you are itching to be party to. The President is going to alert the Chiefs of Staff and order them to expedite our mobilization.”

He swung as if to challenge Kneeland. Kneeland blinked and shook his head until that outlaw eye had focused on Clegg.

“The President—” He gulped. “You say the President will approve?”

“He has approved. As soon as we adjourn, I’m flying to the Enfield area to take personal command.”

“One—one more question.” Kneeland was pale and trembling. “Under Plan Black Cat, what is to be the status of our own weapons research?”

Clegg’s gaunt form drew straighter. “I never wanted a genetic weapon. I warned and fought those hell-sent fiends who sought to forge it. If they were the first victims, that is heaven’s justice. But if an actual biological weapon does exist—if God is pressing the blade of Armageddon into my hand—I intend to seize it.”

He turned back to face the group, a righteous pulpit power returning to his voice. “Gentlemen, we stand in the awful shadow of Armageddon, with God’s final judgment close upon us. Whether or not some new hell weapon has been perfected, evil men from many nations will be scrambling to rule the monstrous fiend now loose in Enfield. Task Force Watchdog will challenge and defeat them, wherever their leering heads may lift. We fight for God, this sword of His wrath ready for our righteous hands, and we will not fail.”

He nodded at Kneeland, his tone gone flat.

“Okay, Gus. Now you may go.”

12

The Burning

Dust

B
elcraft sat stunned and torn in number nine, staring at the silent TV. Fixed on the empty news desk and the KBIO logo behind it, the camera showed no motion. A faint scent of hot asphalt came through the open door. He heard choppers throbbing far away. Several of them now.

Vic? Had Vic stayed in Enfield to die with Marty Marks and all those others? Stayed in a trap he knew was closing? That looked probable. But why? Guilt for his own share in some unthinkable scientific blunder?

Not likely. On the phone last night, he had shown no hint of terror or remorse. Rather, his voice had rung with a sort of grim elation.

Jeri? That young-sounding woman who had answered Vic’s home phone. The live-in companion whom he had never taken time to marry. Was she, too, among the dead? If Vic had known what was coming, and cared for her as he surely did, why hadn’t he gotten her out?

Haunting questions. He found no answers.

Here and now, what for him? Should he run for his life? That panic impulse swept him again. With more choppers arriving, the quarantine around Enfield must have been drawn tighter. Yet gaps would be left. If he waited for the moon and drove without headlamps, he might get through—and carry death for thousands more?

Shuddering, he took fresh stock of his own sensations. Still stiff and dull from that long day on the road, he wanted food and drink. Later a good workout and a good night’s sleep. Certainly he felt nothing deadly consuming him. But perhaps there were no warning signs. Marty Marks had reported none.

The killer? What could kill a city, so silently, so totally, so fast?

Grappling again with that riddle, he recalled a winter night back in Ohio when their parents had bribed him to baby-sit. Vic, the spoiled and willful four-year-old, wouldn’t go to bed. Trying to frighten him into it, he had read him Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Before he came to the end, his own voice had been hoarse and trembling with dread of the mysterious red-cloaked killer, but Vic had merely fallen asleep, so soundly that he had to carry him to bed.

Now he felt dazed and helpless again in that same spell of implacable terror, even though Enfield’s unknown nemesis was not red, as Marty Marks described its aftermath, but shining white.

A synthetic microorganism? Created by some insane project to forge genetic weapons? Or Vic’s own virus of life gone dreadfully wrong? Had Vic known or suspected what he had done, stayed to make some forlorn effort to undo it?

With no answers apparent, he decided to risk a closer look.

Even in that hot room, the notion chilled him. Yet he couldn’t put it down. Suddenly, he had to see the killer for himself. As closely as he dared. The way should be clearing by now. Even if every exit road had been sealed, those toward Enfield would surely be open. If that highway cop was still alive, he would have been called farther back.

If he caught the wind right, if he stayed in the car—

The room went dark.

That asphalt stink suddenly seemed stronger, the stale air suffocating. He stumbled out of the room into the hot night. The choppers filled the sky with their drumbeat, but all he found around him was the empty dark. The
ENBARD MO EL
sign was dead. No lights anywhere. The power system must have been abandoned.

He groped his way to the car and stopped beside it, uncertain of everything and trembling with a shapeless dread of the killer working in the dark. He wanted light. In this total blackout, he could hardly move without the headlamps. Yet any moving light would surely draw the choppers. Louder now, flying lower, they seemed hostile as the killer itself.

He stood by the car till his eyes adjusted. He found stars. Arcturus overhead, red Antares low in the south. Virgo, Bootes, Libra: the constellations he had learned that long-past summer when Vic pestered him into helping grind the mirror for a flimsy little telescope.

Eastward, he found a pale gray glow. The moon? Too early, he thought. The streak of light looked too long, stretching all across the horizon in the direction of Enfield like a mistimed dawn. The white shine Marty Marks had seen?

The shine of death?

A line of ragged trees and a weed-clotted fence row loomed dark against it, showing a road that ran past the parking lot and dipped out of sight toward its pale blaze. A back way into Enfield?

Breathing faster, he climbed into the car. Starting the engine, he felt ah odd elation, all his senses sharpened by the stress between fear and daring. Joy of action lifted him like a heady wine, till dread came back to quench it.

The lights on dim—he thought it shouldn’t really matter if the choppers picked them up—he eased off the empty parking lot and through a straggling hedge to the road. After a mile or so, it dropped into the trees and brush along a narrow stream.

Another loop, perhaps, of the same creek where he had been stopped at the quarantine perimeter. The land beyond lay featureless and black, sloping up again toward that bright horizon line.

Close enough. He stopped on a low bluff above the stream. The road ran on, over a narrow bridge and into the shadows beneath that shine. He turned the car. Ready for a quick retreat, he stepped out and lifted a wet finger to test the wind. The hot night seemed breathless. He stood by the car, watching that silent fire, waiting for the killer.