Death Wave (27 page)

“So he's sensitive about his wife, is he?”

“Very,” said Castiglione, rubbing his throat.

“We can use that.”

“Yes, for certain. But be careful! He's like an unexploded bomb about her. One instant he's perfectly fine, then—
boom!—
he goes off.”

Halleck smiled coldly. “Well, I won't have any private meetings with him, that's for sure. In the meantime, perhaps we could arrest him for assault.”

Castiglione shook his head. “It's a trivial charge, and—”

“Attempted murder?”

“The local authorities would have to arrest him, and he'd be out on bail in a few hours. We couldn't hold him.”

“Too bad,” said Halleck. “At any rate, I suppose I should have a serious talk with Carlos Otero.”

*   *   *

Leaning back comfortably in his desk chair, Otero was actually smiling as Jordan told him about his meeting with Castiglione.

“You throttled him?”

“I lost my temper,” Jordan admitted, almost sheepishly.

Before Otero could reply, he saw his desktop phone screen flashing yellow, with the name
ANITA HALLECK
printed out across its face.

“Oh, oh,” he murmured. “Here she is now.”

“Halleck?”

Nodding, Otero instructed the phone to project Halleck's image onto the three-dimensional viewer built into the wall across his office.

The chairwoman of the World Council sat behind her desk, wearing a sky blue blouse and a somber, grim expression. Her eyes widened momentarily as she saw Jordan seated before Otero's desk, but she quickly recovered from her surprise.

“I'm pleased to see you both,” she said in a voice that could etch steel.

“And it's always a delight to see you, Anita,” Otero replied, grinning.

“You're harboring a fugitive, Carlos. That isn't wise.”

“Mr. Kell is a fugitive? What crime has he been charged with?”

“He was in protective custody, as you well know.”

Jordan spoke up. “That's an honor I respectfully decline. And I'd like my wife to be released, too.”

“Impossible,” Halleck snapped. “She's working willingly with our scientists.”

Leaning both his beefy forearms on his desktop, Otero said, “It wouldn't look good for you if Mr. Kell complained on worldwide video that you're holding his wife captive.”

“It wouldn't be good for you, Carlos, if you go through with your plan to put Mr. Kell on your network.”

Otero waved a dismissive hand in the air. “My lawyers tell me that we're perfectly within our rights. Mr. Kell is not a criminal. Neither is his wife.”

“Your lawyers will get their chance to represent you in court, after we've arrested you for breaching the security laws.”

“See you in court, then,” Otero said. “After my interview with Mr. Kell.”

“Carlos, you can't—”

“Just a minute,” Jordan interrupted. “We're getting away from the important point. There's a wave of death heading toward Earth—”

“Which won't be here for another two thousand years,” Halleck scoffed.

“But it will engulf other worlds, it will wipe out other intelligent creatures.”

“So you say.”

Otero, his face dead serious, said, “So we will
show
on our program. We have some very frightening evidence to put on the air.”

Leveling a finger at him, Halleck said, “If you try to put this scaremongering material on the air, I'll have the electrical power supply from the power satellites cut off for all of Massachusetts, all of New England, if need be!”

Otero laughed. “That would be a grand feather in your cap, wouldn't it? That would win you a lot of votes for your reelection next year.”

“No, it will be
you
who causes the blackout, by trying to broadcast alien propaganda.”

“Propaganda?” Jordan yelped.

“I am not going to allow alien propaganda to be foisted on the general public,” Halleck said. “For all I know, Mr. Kell, you are a willing agent for the aliens in their scheme to take over the Earth.”

“That's ridiculous!”

Otero was still smiling, more broadly than ever. “This is great! We'll get more viewers than ever if they're scared of an alien invasion.”

Halleck started to snap out a reply, but checked herself. She drew in a breath and then, very deliberately, she said to Jordan, “If you want to see your wife again, Mr. Kell, don't go through with this broadcast.”

And her image winked out.

*   *   *

Once the connection was cut, Anita Halleck allowed her iron-hard self-control to loosen. She slumped in her desk chair and laid her head on the desktop.

He's a madman, she told herself. Jordan Kell is absolutely insane with this idea of saving alien worlds from the death wave. Maybe he actually is working for the aliens. Maybe this is all some convoluted plot …

She stopped and sat up straight. The worst sin in politics, she reminded herself, is to believe your own propaganda.

Kell's going to go through with his broadcast and Otero's going to make it possible. All right, let them. Don't try to stop them, use them. Turn them to your own advantage.

And she remembered another dictum about politics: Don't get mad, get even.

I'll destroy Otero if it takes me the rest of my life! she vowed.

Then she saw that Gilda Nordquist had called. Her message line said,
Urgent, re Mrs. Kell.
Nothing more. But that was enough to get Halleck to return her call.

 

BOSTON

“We'd better put your show on the air as soon as we can,” Otero told Jordan, “before Halleck figures out a way to stop us.”

Still seated before Otero's desk, Jordan asked, “Can she actually cut off the electrical power from the satellites?”

With a grim smile, Otero said, “She'd have to declare a state of emergency first. That would take some time, perhaps a few days.”

“And the whole region would go into a blackout.”

“She's not going to do that. The repercussions would ruin her.”

“I wonder,” Jordan mused.

“The way to prevent it,” Otero said, “is to get you on the air before she can act.”

“I'm ready whenever you are.”

Drumming his fingers on his desktop, Otero muttered, “I'd wanted a big publicity buildup for your show, but we don't have the time for that now. I'll tell my programming chief to put your show on as a special, cancel our regular prime-time programming for tomorrow evening.”

Jordan watched as Otero considered the pros and cons of the idea. At last he nodded once, firmly, his mind made up.

To his phone, Otero commanded, “Get me McKinley.”

His mustachioed face breaking into an almost boyish grin, Otero said, “Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead!”

*   *   *

It was already night in Barcelona. Anita Halleck stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows of her office and watched the lights of the city twinkling in the darkness.

Why does Kell have to be so stubborn? she asked herself for the hundredth time. Why is he doing this to me?

And the answer came to her as it had the other ninety-nine times: Kell wants my job. He wants to be chairman of the World Council. He's spent his life as a diplomat and then he went off to New Earth. Everybody in the world recognized his name, his face. The popular vote would be a landslide for him and the Council would have no choice but to appoint him chairman.

And where does that leave me? Out in the cold, after so many years of hard work and faithful service. I
deserve
to head the World Council! I've earned the job. I've led them through the second greenhouse floods, rebuilt whole cities, established a global economic order, moved millions of refugees to safety; I've seen to it that they were fed, that they found decent homes and incomes for themselves, schools for their children.

And now this ex-diplomat, this star traveler, is going to snatch my position away from me? Never!

It's a plot, a damned plot by the aliens. They get Kell to take over the World Council and then they start taking over our world. All this talk about a death wave and saving other planets is a ruse, a sham to hide their real motivation. They want to take over Earth and Jordan Kell is their Judas goat.

“Gilda Nordquist,” the phone announced.

Halleck snapped her attention back to the present, to this moment, here in her office where she held the power to move people.

“Send her in.”

Nordquist strode into the office, tall and broad-shouldered. She's built like an Olympic swimmer, Halleck thought. Although Olympic athletes don't wear skintight mid-thigh dresses of glittering metallic fabric.

Gesturing to the chairs in front of her desk, Halleck said, “There's a problem with Mrs. Kell?”

Nordquist's open, clear-eyed face looked serious. Not troubled, as far as Halleck could see, but she was concerned about something.

“She refuses to work with Frankenheimer anymore unless we let her get back together with her husband.”

“Frankenheimer?” Halleck asked.

“The scientist who's been working with her on the aliens' communications system. She's been cooperating with him, even put him in contact with the alien engineers on New Earth. But all of a sudden she says she won't do any more until she's reunited with Kell.”

“The little bitch!”

“Frankenheimer wants to continue with the work,” Nordquist continued, calm and unemotional. “He's drooling over the prospect of constructing an FTL communicator for himself.”

“For the World Council,” Halleck corrected.

“Yes, of course. But he can't do anything unless Mrs. Kell cooperates with him.”

“And she won't cooperate unless we let her reunite with Kell.”

Nordquist nodded.

“Meanwhile, Kell's planning to do a broadcast on the Otero Network. He'll bring out every maniac and fanatic in the world.”

Nordquist said nothing.

Halleck murmured, “I've been talking with the Americans on the Council. They all have this silly allegiance to what they call ‘freedom of the press.'”

“An outmoded term.”

“But it's like a sacred commandment to them.”

For a long moment neither woman spoke a word. Halleck was searching in her mind for a way to stop Kell's broadcast and get his alien wife working again with the scientists. Nordquist merely sat, watching the stream of emotions flowing across the chairwoman's face.

At last Nordquist said, “I may have a way to solve the problem.”

“You do?”

“Move Mrs. Kell to an orbital facility, where she'll be totally dependent on us. Bring Kell to the facility so they can be reunited. Don't let either one of them leave the facility.”

Halleck shook her head. “He'd see through that. He'd refuse to go.”

“Not if you tell him that the two of them can leave the facility and return to Earth whenever they wish.”

“Do you think he'd be foolish enough to believe that?”

“Apparently he loves his wife and wants to be with her. We can at least dangle that carrot before his eyes.”

“And if he goes for it…”

“The two of them stay in the orbital facility, incommunicado, for as long as we choose.”

Halleck thought it over for another few moments. Then, “It's worth a try.”

“Good.”

“Let's do it. Get Frankenheimer to move his laboratory to orbit.”

“And there's one more thing you have to do, if you please.”

Looking surprised, Halleck asked, “What?”

“Promote me to head of the security section and get rid of the incompetent oaf who's in charge now.”

With a laugh, Halleck said, “Done.” Before Nordquist could react, though, she added, “Once you get Kell and his alien wife into orbit.”

 

OTERO STUDIO SIX

The control booth felt hot, stuffy, with so many corporate executives jammed into it. Vera Griffin was nervous as she wormed the communicator into her right ear. Mr. Otero himself was standing right behind her chair, with Jordan Kell at his side.

The network had blanketed the airwaves with announcements of the special show about the death wave and promises of showing actual imagery of alien planets. The programming chief expected a record audience for the show. If anything went wrong, if the executives' high expectations weren't met, Griffin knew her career as a producer would be finished before it began.

Rudy's offered to take me to Barcelona, she reminded herself. But then she wondered how reliable Castiglione would be. He's the type to leave me when I need him most, she realized.

As she watched the lights going on down on the studio floor, she heard a woman's voice behind her say, almost timidly, “Mr. Otero, it's time for you to go to Makeup, sir.”

Otero's voice had a smile in it as he replied, “Do you think I really
need
makeup?”

“Well … I … uh, I think we should let the makeup director decide that, sir.”

With a dramatic sigh, Otero responded, “Oh, I suppose I should, shouldn't I?”

“And you, too, Mr. Kell,” the woman said, her tone suddenly unyielding. “Makeup.”

For the next hour Griffin operated on autopilot, making certain that the set below this crowded, oppressive booth was correctly lit, the imagery that they intended to show was ready, every technician and camera and microphone and speck of dust was in place and operating properly.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the screen that was showing what the network was sending out over the air. Puffery about alien worlds, and the death wave, and the fact that Carlos Otero himself—founder and head of Otero Network—was personally going to host this very special show. With a surprise guest.