Nemesis (24 page)

Hooper:
It has to be the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Joint Chiefs.

Chalfont:
And if SecDef was in that plane crash?

Hooper:
Well, that’s a pretty hypothetical scenario, if I may say so, sir.

Chalfont:
But what if?

Hooper:
You’re into a massive decapitation there, but there are still procedures. [Remainder of reply deleted.]

There’s a conspiracy to overthrow the President, maybe kill him. They want me to join it, and I’m thinking about it
.

The gorilla leaned precariously backwards, mouth agape, scratching its armpits and making what it imagined were gorilla-like noises. A French whore, her slim legs straddling the neck of her onion-selling companion, stretched her arm over the gorilla, unsteadily trying to pour a glass of red Martini down its throat. The onion seller staggered, the whore screamed, Martini arced through the air and a little crowd cheered as they collapsed on to the grass and the gorilla jumped up and down shouting
Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!

God, I hate these people
.

Wallis had another problem. She was a dusky, blonde, man-eating southern belle, full of pouting coyness; she was dressed in a red crinoline dress of alarming cleavage; and she was also, Wallis had learned with increasing desperation, persistent to the point of obtuseness. Ten minutes of guttural snarling in response to her subtle probing had failed to dislodge her.

“What exactly do you do, honey?” she finally asked outright, in an Alabama drawl.

“I’m a sanitary engineer,” he said in a sudden inspiration.

“You mean you’re not in movies?” she asked in dismay, the demure pout vanishing and the accent becoming pure Bronx.

“Hell no, I’m in excrement, Miss. You know the Chinese have been spreading sewage on their fields for thousands of years? Well a bunch of us thought, why can’t we do the same here? So we’ve got a pilot plant going, trying to turn the sludge into little pellets for fertilizer. It’s working fine except the stuff smells, but we’re working on that too. Say, that guy near the marquee—oh, he’s just gone in—wasn’t that Hal Brooker?”

“Hal Brooker the movie producer?” she asked, turning.

“Yeah I think so. They tell me he’s casting for some costume piece about the Civil War. Anyway, the beauty is, we
extract the methane from the crap and use it as a fuel to operate the process. So the plant costs nothing to run, isn’t that exciting?”

“Real exciting,” she said. “Listen, it’s been nice talking to you.”

“But there’s more. Methane is a greenhouse gas,” Wallis called after the retreating figure. “By burning it up we’re helping the environment.” But Miss Low Cleavage had vanished along the flight path to the marquee.

God, I hate these people
, Wallis thought again. He drifted casually across the lawn, drink in hand, judging the ebb and flow of the crowd. Past the pool. Don’t catch anybody’s eye. Expensive bridgework sparkled at him out of a tanned face; Wallis pretended not to see it. People were dancing. The Tijuana Brass were sending soft, metallic notes over the rich, the beautiful and the Mexican waiters in short red jackets and tight black trousers.

Report the conspiracy and condemn my son to death. A boy of sixteen, somewhere in the Alleghenies
.

Down the steps to the patio, where a large pig was covered in banana leaves, with its body cavity stuffed and its alimentary canal replaced by a long metal spit. The pig rotated unhappily about its horizontal axis while flames roasted its flesh and its fellow mammals nibbled at canapés and drank tequila from salt-encrusted glasses. The smell of burning charcoal and flesh hovered over the party. Wallis passed by.

Report it to whom? How deep does the treason go?

About fifty yards out from the lodge, the crowds began to thin. Little clusters of people chattered and laughed under the floodlit magnolia trees and the monkey puzzles. The trees were draped with tinsel and linked by long chains of multi-coloured lanterns; but the Christmas lights were more for effect than illumination, and here the shadows were dark. An overheated Santa Claus, his face flushed, was into a serious discussion with a Barbary pirate. Wallis nodded to them but he passed by unnoticed. Then he was at the edge of the
lawn, marked out by bougainvillaea. He glanced behind, and casually strolled through them, into the shadows and the fir trees.

He went steadily on, the carpet of pine crackling under his feet. A couple of hundred yards in he stopped. There were shafts of light through the branches, but no human silhouettes: he was alone. Latin American rhythm was still in the air, but the night sounds of the forest were beginning to compete.

But what if the President is the traitor, and the conspirators are the loyal Americans? Are the patriots really the guys who win, by definition?

He came across a track, just visible in the darkness. Whether made by humans or large animals he could not say, but he followed it. It climbed steeply up. About half a mile from the lodge, panting with exertion, he cut away from the path and wandered randomly, still climbing. He came to a clearing about twenty yards wide, and sat down. The ground was bone dry and covered with moss. Pinewood scented the air. There was a gust of laughter and a woman’s scream from far below. Someone had fallen or jumped into the pool.

I don’t need to think about stuff like that. The President is my commanding officer. I obey his orders. Period
.

A half moon had risen over the mountains to the right, and it was reflecting off the snowy peaks, and the roofs of the Mercs and Porsches parked behind the lodge. The Pacific was a huge black hole over to the left.

The classic Nuremberg Defence. I vass only obeying orders
.

Wallis had a brief, fantastic urge to get out of it, find a freeway, hitch a lift to anywhere. But not at night, in flowing Arab robes. Not even in California.

There was a metallic glint from far along the approach road to the lodge. Wallis could just make out a shadowy figure, standing. The man might have been speaking into a walkie-talkie.

I’m not cut out for this frigging moral dilemma stuff
.

The soldier lay back, his eyes by now dark-adapted. The

broad swathe of the Milky Way was overhead, dazzling, amazing. The filmy ribbon was divided by a great black rift; it swirled across the sky, a highway for gods and ghosts and creatures of the mind.

Was Jefferson right? Country before obedience? But who sets the acceptable limits on obedience? The guys giving the orders?

Something came into his vision, approaching from the Pacific. It was a moving star. It grew brighter and Wallis sat up. A faint chopping sound came over “Stranger on the Shore” and the shrilling cicadas. A helicopter. Two miles out from the lodge, its lights were extinguished. It was just visible in the moonlight. It flew low over the trees, descending. The soldier lost it behind a hill but it reappeared, sinking towards the lodge. It touched down about three hundred yards back from the car park. A solitary figure came out, bent double, and moved briskly towards the back of the lodge. The chopper revved up, rose and soared away, following the line of the approach road and disappearing from Wallis’s sight.

Wallis wondered about that. He was startled to find himself wondering about the beliefs, quietly held and strongly cherished, which had guided his life.

Maybe everything I’ve ever believed is junk. Maybe patriotism and loyalty and morality are just brain implants, devices put in my head from the age of five for purposes of control. Maybe it’s all just a game and there’s no right and wrong beyond my own sense of right and wrong. So follow my private conscience and screw the rules?

He lit up a small Jamaica cheroot, his match throwing a brief circle of light around him. He was still thinking in confused circles, a cigar later, when the hairs on the back of his head began to prickle. There was the faintest crackle of breaking pine needles, somewhere behind him. Casually, he stood up and turned. A young man, standing in the shadows. Twenty yards away. Smart, dark suit, close-cropped hair. Motionless as a statue.

“Sorry to startle you, sir. General Hooper’s compliments. He requests that you rejoin the party.”

“Evening, fella. Now how the hell did you find me way up here?” With a gut-wrenching start, Wallis realized that he must have been under surveillance from the moment he had left the party.

“If you’ll follow me down, sir.”

The party was three drinks noisier. The Tijuana Brass were into some frenetic number, but a young couple were dancing, waist-high in the water, to some private music of their own. Wallis followed the young man across the lawn, past the pool and over the patio. The young man nodded farewell and made off in unparty-like, military strides. A fat man in dark glasses and a blue sombrero had a slice of pork wedged between two thick slices of bread in one hand, and a large cigar in the other. He saw Wallis and detached himself from a group. Silver sequins covered the man’s sombrero and extended down over his black suit, as if he had been showered with sticky confetti. Wallis recognized him first by the whiff of Macanudo cigar smoke.

“Ah, there you are, Foggy. Great party, huh? Saw you and the Farmington girl. Should’ve stuck in there, boy, that family owns half of Texas.”

“Which half?”

“The one Margaret doesn’t own.”

“I’m an old married man, sir,” said Wallis.

“Sure you are, yes sirree. Son, you can’t just hide away like that, the world’s too small and we’re too smart. You want to mix mix mix. We got a visitor. Follow follow follow.”

Hooper, wriggling his fat bottom energetically, rumba’d his way past the now half-eaten pig. He gobbled the last of his sandwich and lifted two red Martinis from a passing silver tray, leaving the smoking cigar. He blew the waiter a kiss, but the man’s Aztec features remained frozen. Then the soldiers were through the open French windows of the lodge.
A log fire crackled in the downstairs room, throwing its flickering light over a dozen hugging couples.

Wallis followed his leader up the pinewood stairs and along a corridor whose floor was soft with Chinese carpet and whose subdued lighting showed walls lined with paintings signed by de Heem, Marieschi and Laurencin. They passed Wallis’s bedroom and turned left into a small study, all red decor and mock colonial furniture. The band had started up on “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and the door shut it off with a pneumatic clunk.

A werewolf, in a dark three-piece suit, was lounging back in a grey swivel chair behind a desk, the hairs of its face bristling. A lamp and a thin, red book were on the desk, which was otherwise bare. Eyes assessed Wallis from behind the mask. The werewolf indicated chairs and the soldiers sat down. Hooper took off his sombrero and dropped it to the floor, and the bonhomie went off with it. The soldiers put their drinks on the desk.

“The Ayrab—is he with us or not?” the werewolf asked.

“We have a definite maybe,” Hooper replied.

“What’s his hangup?”

“Some crap about his oath of allegiance.”

“Look,” said Wallis, “what General Hooper tells me is that I have two duties, one to my President and one to my country. The two have always coincided. Until now. What we have now is a President unable to act because he’s frozen by cowardice or pacifism or whatever, and I have to ask, which comes first, President or country?”

The werewolf nodded encouragement, but its eyes were filled with caution.

“My oath of allegiance is to the Constitution, not the President. But, we have procedures. Remove him constitutionally, I tell the General here. But he tells me that the act of so removing the President is too dangerous. The Russians will cotton on to what’s happening and try to nuke us, out of fear for
themselves. The story he’s trying to sell me is that the price of constitutional action is the obliteration of America. Which would make the Constitution a bit pointless in the first place.”

“He’s grasped the issue. I told you he’s a bright boy,” said Hooper.

“But what the General forgot to mention,” Wallis continued, “is that the Chief might act at the last. Maybe he’s praying for a miracle. When the Almighty fails to oblige, the President might still come up with the Major Attack Option. We just won’t know until Nemesis is practically in our air space. Any removal of the Chief before the last seconds is blatant mutiny.”

Hooper made a noise like escaping steam, and gulped down the second of his drinks. Bellarmine took off his mask and said: “Colonel, it’s the only way we ever thought to operate.”

“I don’t know why I’m listening to this. This chatter is about treason. The decision to nuke belongs to the President of the United States and him alone.”

“I don’t believe so,” the Secretary of Defense replied calmly. He opened the book in front of him. “Truman document NSC memorandum number thirty invests the authority to launch nukes with the President. Okay. But there’s an answer,” he continued. “Listen to this. Here is Section Four of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution:

“Whenever the Vice-President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President
pro tempore
of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice-President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President . . .”

“Now hold on, sir,” said Wallis. “Who are the executive department? Surely at least the Cabinet? What about presidential aides?”

“Why not the whole frigging civil service?” Hooper interrupted. “Let’s wait for the cruise missiles to swarm out of Chesapeake Bay like Venus arising and then get the Speaker out of his bed, assemble Congress for a nice cosy debate and have the typists standing by for the written declaration. The missiles will get here faster than you can read it, never mind type it, but hell, I’m just a soldier, I guess we have to get the Supreme Court in on the act while the bombs are falling.”