Shadow Knight's Mate (9 page)

The cruelest happened in Louisville and Minneapolis and Tulsa. There the robots landed on playgrounds just before sunset, where parents let children continue to play in the mild evening. The robots were so familiar to the children they came flocking, and parents hardly even bothered to call them away. Many of the kids didn't have parents there, anyway. They were neighborhood playgrounds, a block or two from home, within the sound of a parent's call. And some of the children were young teens, sitting on swings and talking and feeling vaguely nostalgic for their childhoods, so few years past.

When the robots' tops opened the children were startled, then delighted as the little cylinders spewed out their cargo, spraying them in a high arc where they fell clattering among the children.

Cell phones.

They came in pink and silver and bright metallic green, and everyone grabbed for them. These were nine and ten-year-olds, just below the age of owning their own cell phones, but old enough to crave them. Even the young teenagers who already had cell phones wanted these newer models. They shoved younger kids out of the way to lunge for them. Everyone got one. A few started making calls right away. “Guess what I just got!” The cell phones were already activated. Kids played with them happily, punching buttons to find out their numbers and calling each other, making call lists, playing games. They knew how to work these devices as instinctively as their grandparents had spun tops and picked up jacks.

Most of them didn't even notice the tiny warm slithery
feeling as something was injected from the phones into their ear canals. Certainly no one displayed symptoms in that first golden hour of twilight. The most susceptible grew dizzy walking home. But by early evening they all had fevers. When news began to break about what these cylinders were doing across the country, a few cautious parents took their sick children to emergency rooms. One alarmed ER doctor even ordered a CT scan, and thereby located the tiny radioactive seed that had worked its way down the child's blood vessels into his lungs, where it was poisoning him with growing rapidity. But finding the seed didn't solve anything. There was no antidote.

By midnight the parents and caregivers and medical personnel had the “illness” too. The poisoning elements spread with amazing speed. Hundreds were infected before morning, and the infection like wildfire as emergency workers tried to contain it. Whole portions of the three cities were quarantined, but to no avail.

Cell phones lay on the floor of children's bedrooms and hospital rooms.

The culmination of the evening was a small nuclear explosion in the Nevada desert, close in fact to the area where nuclear testing had been conducted for decades. This one, though, was close enough for Las Vegans to see the mushroom cloud. The desert winds were unpredictable, no one was willing to guess whether they would blow the radioactive dust toward the city or away from it. Evacuation began haphazardly at first, then with slightly more organization, but emptying America's fastest-growing city in only a few hours' time was impossible. There weren't enough ways out. As in Houston when Hurricane Rita had approached a decade earlier, the city turned into one giant gridlock, and stayed that way for hours. No one died of radiation poisoning, but several were killed in car wrecks, and looting was widespread. Even fabled casino security broke down, as guards began helping themselves to cash along with the customers. A few kept playing the slots, deep into the night.

The Next Morning

The President went on the air at 5:30 a.m., Eastern Time. It was still dark all across the country, and many people hadn't yet heard of the attacks. Nevertheless, President Witt had an audience of eighty million viewers, which increased when the tape was replayed on all the morning news shows.

“My fellow Americans,” he began. “Some of you have heard of the mysterious attacks across this country in the last few hours. This is not a time to panic. Emergency personnel are responding. The victims are being treated and the threats ended. There have been many casualties, but we do not expect any more. The danger is being contained.

“The best thing all of you can do for your country today is to go about your normal lives. The attacks were very confined. Most American cities were not affected at all. Let us show the world the strength of Americans. We will live through this. We will prosper and grow.

“Our intelligence services have been working through the night and will continue to work to find the source of these attacks. In the first analysis, we believe this threat to our national security is not from a … not from a terrorist nation or even a terrorist group. No group has claimed responsibility.”

Now the President looked his gravest as he stared into the camera lens. Jefferson Witt had gotten elected partly because of his mature, thoughtful appearance. Exhausted by a cowboy presidency, a majority of Americans wanted someone stable and gray, even slow. Tonight Witt looked much grayer than when he'd been elected a year ago. His first visible response to the crisis was to look tired.

But there was resolve in his voice. In his next sentences he would take the first major steps of his presidency, the ones that would define him for history. And he believed deeply in what he was about to say. His eyes grew livelier and his voice stronger.

“But these attacks will not be ended by reprisals, no matter how rapidly and forcefully we respond. That kind of reaction is
from another age. That page of history has been turned.

“Every nation, no matter how powerful, is vulnerable to attacks such as we have seen overnight. They will not end by our destroying some terrorist bases or even toppling regimes and occupying whole countries. We have seen the failures of such policies in recent years.

“No. We are going to do what my advisors and I had planned to do already, what I campaigned saying America should do. A large majority agreed with me. Well, now is the time.

“We are going to begin withdrawing American forces from around the globe. We are calling our men and women home. They have been stretched too thin for too long. We will not demand more of them.”

The President raised one finger and shook it as if reprimanding a class. “No more will America be the world's policeman
or
the world's whipping boy. We are going to stand down. We will be an equal at the world's table. Other nations will have to solve their own problems.”

The President knew the danger he faced. It was difficult to put a good face on this retreat, with dead Americans, many of them children, lying in hospitals and morgues across the country. But he and his speechwriters thought they knew how America would respond, and they counted on the fact that a large majority of Americans were exhausted from years of war and intervention. Jefferson Witt was a picture of strength, not of cowardice, as he continued to stare forcefully into the camera.

“America has never run from a fight. We have plunged into so many conflicts in order to save someone else. We are not running from this. But this is not a fight, not in any sense we have ever known. There is no other country to attack. We will continue to work to bring these attackers to justice, but that doesn't mean we have to continue to support a huge military establishment in order to protect the world. That is not our job, if it ever was. This is not a retreat, it is a consolidation. A protection of our own vital interests.

“I have ordered the immediate withdrawal of the first units of American troops from the Middle East, from Asia, from Europe.
This will not be done in haste, but in a timely way we will bring all our forces home.”

The President smiled. It was a slight smile, but on his craggy face, at the end of that terrible night, it was dazzling. The President's smile reassured. His voice was hearty as he concluded, “This is the end of the age of American domination. But it is the dawn of the age of American peace. Of America taking care of itself. This will be the golden age. My fellow Americans, I ask you to join me in asking God to bless our great nation as we step forward into a bright new day. Thank you.”

There seemed to be a long moment's silence across the entire country. It was broken, at least in the Circle's Colorado compound, by Gladys Leaphorn, who exclaimed, “The Age of American Selfishness. He has proclaimed it!”

“And America wants it,” Jack said quietly. “That's why Witt got elected.”

“This is what he's wanted to announce all along,” Arden said, then her eyes shot around the room. “You don't think—”

“No.” Jack shook his head, and he wasn't the only one. “He wouldn't do it like this. Even Witt isn't that stupid. If anything, these attacks probably slowed down his plans. But you know—”

“Yes,” the Chair said wearily. There was much more to this than the President's public announcement. There always was. Within a few hours they should know more. “Let's wait until the others get here,” Gladys added, and she rolled away for a morning nap. She was back in her wheelchair, and moving very slowly. Jack and Arden exchanged a glance, and Arden jumped up to help her grandmother to bed.

“But Witt is our man!” exclaimed a senior member of the Circle. “We helped get him elected. We have all kinds of—”

“We helped him because we knew his election was inevitable anyway,” Alicia Mortenson said, and her husband nodded. They were now wearing outlandish flowered shirts and touristy shorts. No one asked if they'd been vacationing when they'd gotten the
call to assemble. Maybe this was just the way they dressed around the house.

“But my point,” insisted the first man, “is that we exert all kinds of influence over him. So many vectors intersect at him—”

“Perhaps we're not so influential as we think,” interrupted Janice Gentry, the Yale history professor. “Someone certainly seems to have dominated him in the first reaction to this crisis.”

There weren't as many members gathered as there had been at the last meeting, only a dozen or so, in the bunker at the base of the Rocky Mountains that was the group's only fallback position, or at least the only one Jack knew about. But these dozen represented all wings of the group's power and influence: academia, diplomatic, the scientific and entertainment industries, and one junior editorial writer from the
Denver Post.

The one who had proclaimed the group's influence was Professor Clifford Warner, currently on sabbatical at the Sorbonne, who had happened to be at an academic conference in Chicago and had rushed here when the attacks began. Warner was a tall, thin man, with long arms and legs that sometimes distracted his students from what he was saying. Today he couldn't sit still. He paced and fretted, making everyone tired. “That National Security Advisor,” he exclaimed, snapping his fingers. “The one none of us knows. He must be behind this.”

Jack wanted to say, “Duh,” but he was much too junior in this group. Besides, icy politeness was more this group's style than outright insult. Professor Gentry applied the style as she said, “Excellent thinking, Clifford. I believe you're right. But we must stop this now. Withdrawal of our forces from around the world will be like the ocean receding, exposing things we wish to remain hidden.”

Craig Mortenson said quietly, “I have one source privy to the President's plan. It's worse than he announced. Withdrawing troops is only phase one. He even wants to close our embassies. Leave no American presence in the world at all. He believes this will take away any incentive to attack us. Only American companies would continue to operate abroad. We would be
the world's bankers and businessmen, but not its diplomats or soldiers.”

Startled, Arden cried, “But that—!” She recovered quickly, cutting off the sentence she didn't need to say. The grave faces told her as much.

Gladys Leaphorn asked Craig, “Does your source have any influence?”

Craig answered slowly, “My source is not a policy advisor and is not one of us. If—my source—ever offered an opinion, probably the President's confidence would be withdrawn. We wouldn't even have a pipeline to his thinking.”

Everyone heard the careful gender-neutrality of Craig Mortenson's statement. He wasn't usually so politically correct. They wondered just how close to the President his source was.

But that person wasn't going to be any help at the moment. “Let's go!” the Chair said. “We need to do what we do. But we need to do it more quickly than we ever have before. Some subtlety may need to be abandoned.”

“On the other hand,” Jack ventured to say, “perhaps we can slow down events to allow—”

Gladys snapped her fingers and pointed his direction, awarding Jack points. He didn't smile. The Chair turned to someone else in the group and said, “Call General Reynolds and our other military contacts. Surely it will not be possible to mobilize such a large withdrawal very quickly.”

The member smiled. “Some of those boys can take three weeks to strike a tent. And there are always vouchers to mislay. Foot-dragging is what our forces do best. In peacetime, anyway. I'll—”

He turned away without finishing the sentence. Another couple of members had already slipped away as well. Gladys raised her voice. “We should know more in a few hours. We'll keep you informed. And you keep us informed as well. This is not SOP. We must coordinate. Work your contacts, but report here before you do anything. This must be a joint operation. No rogue missions. Understand?”

They were already leaving, some of them shuffling, some walking briskly on high heels. They were a very strange-looking task force for being assigned the job of saving the world. The median age was about fifty-five, and none of them was a secret agent or even a soldier. Nevertheless, their backs were straight, their eyes alight and most of all their brains churning. It was a brave band of siblings that headed swiftly for the exits.

“Go Hornets,” Jack said quietly.