The Dragon Factory (28 page)

He thought about the stone that the female had been kicked for throwing. It burned him that she hadn’t picked it up and taken it with her. It seemed to Eighty-two that it was the smartest thing to do. Keep it. Maybe . . . use it.

But she had tossed it in with the dirt being dug from the hole, unwilling or unable to find a better use for it.

The wrongness of that refused to leave his mind. It burned in his thoughts like a drop of frying grease that had spattered on his skin. Why hadn’t she thought to take the stone for which she had been beaten? What was it about the New Men that kept them from fighting back? There were hundreds of them on the island and only sixty guards and eighty-three technicians. The New Men were very strong, and though they screamed when beaten it was clear to Eighty-two—who knew something about hurt and harm—that they could endure a great deal of pain. They would cringe, cry out, weep, even collapse to the ground when being beaten, but within minutes they were able to return to hard labor. Eighty-two did not yet know if they faked some of their pain, amplifying their screams because that’s what was expected of them, because screams satisfied the guards and satisfaction was part of why the New Men existed. It was an idea Eighty-two had been playing with for weeks, and it was what made the incident of the stone so crucial to his understanding.

In his dreams—sleeping and waking—the New Men rose up all at once and tore the guards to pieces. Like the animal men in the H. G. Wells book
The Island of Dr. Moreau,
Eighty-two’s dreamworld ideal of the New Men saw them finally throwing off the abuse and torment and slaughtering the evil humans. Eighty-two longed to see the House of Screams echo with the same kind of cries of furious justice that had shook the walls of Wells’s House of Pain.

And Eighty-two would have believed it to be more of a possibility if the female had just taken the damn stone.

The evening burned on and Eighty-two found that he could not endure another night of doing nothing.

He left his room and crawled along the sloping tiled roof to the end, waited for the security camera to pan away. Eighty-Two had long ago memorized every tick and flicker of the compound’s cameras. When you’re that bored you find ways of filling the time. Once the camera turned away he would have ninety-eight seconds to reach the rain gutter on the far side of this wing. He made it easily, paused again as another camera moved through its cycle. One move at a time, always counting, always patient, Eighty-two made his way from his bedroom window to the spot where he’d perched earlier today. The garden below was draped in purple shadows.

Eighty-two jumped from the corner of the roof to the closer of the two big palms, caught the trunk in a familiar place, and then shimmied down with practiced ease. At the base he stopped, waited for the ground camera to sweep past, and then he sprinted along the edge of the new chicken coop to the flower bed on the far side. The rich black dirt from the postholes had been spread out atop the flower bed. Eighty-two bent low and let his night vision strengthen until he could make out every detail. He ran his fingers over the dirt, sifting it back and forth, up and down, until he found the lump. His nimble fingers plucked the egg-sized stone from the soil and he weighed it in his palm. It was a piece of black volcanic rock, smooth as glass.

Eighty-two rolled it between his palms as he crouched there, and his eyes drifted toward the porch where the guards had been playing dominoes. The big Australian’s name was Carteret. Eighty-two could imagine him drowsing in his hammock, stupid with too much beer, a porno movie playing on the TV, a cigarette burning out between his slack lips. The image was as clear as if Eighty-two was actually looking at the man. Carteret.

Another part of Eighty-two’s brain replayed the image of the female lying in a knot of convulsed agony. And the laughter of the guards as Carteret walked away from her as if she was less than nothing.

The stone was a comfortable weight in Eighty-two’s hand.

He looked up into the sky—a great, vast diamond-littered forever above the trees—and he wondered why the man named Deacon had not come. Did the e-mail ever reach him? Was he coming at all? Would anyone come?

Eighty-two closed his fist around the stone, feeling its ancient solidity and hardness.

He wondered if he could risk reaching out one more time.

If that didn’t work . . . then what would he do?

There was a high-pitched female scream from the House of Pain. Was it the same female? Had thoughts of her festered in Carteret’s mind all day, the way the thought of the stone had burned in Eighty-two’s?

The boy stared with narrowed eyes at the laboratory complex. The House of Screams. Above him the speakers in the palm trees began to wail. The dog handlers were getting ready to release the dogs for the night.

Time to go.

He smoothed the dirt to hide the spot where he’d removed the stone, waited for the ground camera to move, and then went from stillness into action. He ran across the garden, scaled the palm tree effortlessly, and leaped onto the roof. The stone was in his pocket.

The White House

Saturday, August 28, 4:10
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 91 hours, 50 minutes

The Vice President of the United States sat behind his desk, but he felt like he was under a spotlight in the back of a police squad room. Three people stood in front of his desk. Two men and a woman. They’d declined seats or coffee. None of them were smiling. Bill Collins looked from face to face and knew that he had no friends in the room.

The Speaker of the House, Alan Henderson, ran the show. As second in the line of succession, it was his job, if it was anyone’s. He wore an expensive suit with a faint pin stripe and a bow tie that was forty
years out of style. Even during the gravest of national emergencies, the Speaker usually wore a smile of mild amusement that was emblematic of his well-known “this, too, shall pass” point of view. Now his face was as lugubrious as a mortician.

“Well, Bill, I’d say you screwed the pooch on this one. Screwed the pooch and then ran the damn thing over with a steamroller. I just came from seeing the President. You gosh-darn near gave him the heart attack his doctors were trying to sidestep with the bypass.”

The Secretary of State cleared her throat. “I find it alarming that you didn’t consult with me before launching this operation.”

“Are you finished?” Collins asked coldly. “First things first, Alan, when I issued those orders I was the Acting President of the United States, so let’s be quite clear about chain of command here. Whereas I appreciate your loyalty and service to the country, I don’t appreciate your taking that tone of voice with me.”

That shut them all up.

“Second, before I acted I consulted with the Attorney General. Nathan . . . ?”

Nathan Smitrovich, the Attorney General, nodded, though he clearly looked uncertain as to how this was going to play out. “That’s right, Alan. He called me and we talked it over. I . . . um, advised him to bring a few other people into the loop, but he said that there was an issue of trust.”

“Trust?” Alan Henderson suddenly looked anything but mild and homespun. “What the hell . . . who the hell do you think you—”

“Calm down, Alan,” said Collins. “No one is leveling any accusations. At least not at you. Or at anyone in this room. But you have to understand my position. I received confidential information from a source who is positioned well enough to have insider knowledge. The information not only outlined an ongoing campaign of blackmail against the President but included hints that many other members of Congress might be under similar control. I couldn’t risk making this an open issue. If anyone else was involved, then the blackmail material Mr. Church has
might have been made public, and that could have brought down this administration. At the very least it would have crippled it.” He sat back and looked at them, his face calm and open. “You tell me how you would have acted? Tell me how you would have done things differently?”

The Secretary of State, Anne Hartcourt, folded her arms and cocked her head. She didn’t look convinced. “I could buy the confidential informant bit, Bill, and if I stretch my credulity I could accept your rationalization for not including any of us. But are you going to sit there and tell me that this entire operation was cooked up, planned, and set into motion only after the President went under sedation?”

Collins laughed. “Of course not. This information was brought to me a few days ago. After it was announced that the President was to undergo surgery. My informant said that it was the only opportunity he felt would allow for me to make a swift and decisive countermove.”

“Who is this informant?” asked Henderson.

Collins flicked a glance at the AG. “I told Nathan that I wanted to withhold the name of the informant pending the resolution of the situation. And the situation has
not
been resolved. Yes, the President is back in power, but this does not remove the threat.”

“If the threat is even real.”

“I believe it to be real.”

“Why?” asked Anne Hartcourt. “Why are you so convinced?”

Collins hesitated. “Because . . . the informant had information that could have come from only two sources: the President himself or someone who had somehow gathered very private information about the President.”

“What was that information?” asked the Attorney General. “You wouldn’t tell me earlier, but I damn well want to know now.”

“Not a chance, Nathan. I’m leaving for Walter Reed in five minutes. I’ll discuss this directly with the President. If he chooses to allow anyone else to participate in that conversation then it’ll have to be his choice. I will not break the confidence of the President. Not to you and not under any circumstances, even if you drag me before a subcomittee.”

When the others said nothing, he added, “I argued against forming the DMS from the beginning. I warned that it could become a threat, something we would never be able to control.”

Alan Henderson sighed. “I agreed with you about that, too, Bill, but we were overruled. And I do not believe that Mr. Church blackmailed everyone who voted against us. There are some who think that the DMS is doing a valuable, even
crucial
job. Right now the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland both want your head on a platter, and they don’t even
like
Church. But they understand the value of the DMS. Maybe your short-term memory is slipping, Bill, but DMS agents saved your wife’s life two months ago. They saved my life, too. And Anne here, and the First Lady. They’ve prevented terrorists from bringing nukes and weaponized pathogens into this country. They’ve stopped six separate assassination attempts on the President’s life. They prevented the kidnapping of the President’s daughters. And they closed down forty-three separate terrorist cells that were operating inside the United States.”

“I didn’t say they didn’t do some good,” Collins said. “I said that they were going beyond their orders and now pose a threat to this administration.”

“If your informant is correct,” said Hartcourt.

“Yes. And once I speak with the President I will cooperate in every way possible to verify this information.”

“Maybe it’s just me,” muttered Henderson, “but this has a bit of the stink of WMDs on it.”

Collins ignored that. “MindReader may be a useful tool in the War on Terror, but it’s also highly dangerous. That computer system can intrude anywhere, learn everything. Even Church isn’t authorized to know
everything
. You don’t think I looked into this? Asked around? People have been quietly complaining about Church for years, hinting that he’s used his computer to find things out about people and then used that information as a lever to always get his way. They’re blackmailing the President; they’re forcing him to give the DMS more and more power!”

Alan Henderson looked at the others for a moment. The Secretary of State folded her arms and said nothing; the Attorney General shrugged.

“Okay, Bill,” Henderson said, “but you’d better be right about this or this is going to come back and bite you on the ass.”

“If I thought I was wrong, Alan, I would never have done this.”

He looked at his watch.

“I have to get going. My car will be downstairs in two minutes.”

ONCE VICE PRESIDENT
Collins was in his car and had the soundproof window between him and the driver shut, he took out his cell and called J. P. Sunderland.

“How’d it go?” asked Sunderland.

“I feel like I’ve been worked over by prizefighters.”

“Did they buy it?”

“So far, but they’re not exactly on our team. Since we didn’t actually come up with MindReader and can’t prove that Church has anything on the President, we’re going to have to switch to Plan B and do it mighty damn fast. I’m on my way to Walter Reed now to meet with the President. He’s going to want to tear me a new one, so it would be useful if his people got a call about our scapegoat. I don’t want this coming through me, you understand?”

“Sure. Don’t worry, Bill . . . I’ve got it all in hand.”

They disconnected and the Vice President sank back against the cushions and watched the gray buildings of Washington roll past. He looked calm and collected, but inside he was screaming.