Directive 51 (35 page)

The flash was brilliant; from its post far away, the satellite watched the mushroom cloud form.

“I jumped in on the military satellites and we’re getting more of a look, and
Reagan
isn’t far away from them and is bouncing up a recon.”

The captain decided no reprimand was warranted.

Heather hated to admit it but she was beginning to really like Will Norcross’s game spirit. For forty minutes he’d questioned, probed, and listened—especially listened—as he tried to absorb the whole complex mess of Daybreak, its relation to il’Alb, and why recovery was apt to be so time-consuming and difficult.

The door popped open and an assistant burst in. “Mr. Nguyen-Peters!” She held out a sheet of paper; Cam took it and read.

“Congratulations, Dr. Browder,” he said.

Jim looked like he’d received an electric shock. “For what?”

“Somebody just fired a nuke off about twenty-five miles southwest of LA. Luckily we got the flash on a random recording from a Deep Black satellite and were able to get it to a team with working gear to analyze the recording. No uranium, no plutonium, in fact for some unimaginable reason the only significant heavy element in the spectrography of the flash was gold, but there was a huge amount of that.
Reagan
was less than 100 kilometers away and scrambled a drone; they got a sample from the mushroom cloud itself. Unusual amounts of helium-3. Lots of tritium and sodium-24, which is what you get when you blow off the helium-3/deuterium reaction in seawater. No trace of polonium or any other hard alpha emitter, and only as much beryllium as you’d expect from batteries and capacitors on the ship’s electrical system, plus what’s in the seawater. Some excess lithium and deuterium, consistent again with a fusion bomb. You were right—they’ve got a pure fusion bomb.”

“Weird,” Browder said. “Very weird. Why would someone waste a bomb on empty ocean? It wasn’t by any chance an enhanced-fallout weapon?”

“Dead on again,” Cameron said. “Preliminary measurements show the plume is hot as hell with induced radioactivity, and the center of it is heading dead on for Los Angeles. We’ve got people scrambling to try to tell everyone to get out of the way, but it’s pretty much hopeless; we’re going to lose the city unless the wind shifts.”

“What’d they jacket it with?” Browder asked. “Sodium, cobalt, potassium?”

“That’s the weird part,” Cam said, shaking his head. “What’s in that cloud, besides the sodium-24 and the tritium from the salt water, is all the hot isotopes of gold.”

“I guess it works,” Browder said.

“Only about as well as cobalt would have. They make their atom bombs with helium-3, and jacket them in gold . . . I just wonder if we’re facing a bunch of compulsive nuts who have to do everything the hardest, most expensive way they can think of.”

Will Norcross stood. “I’m told there are other briefings I need to get to,” he said. “What I just heard was this: We have established that our enemy, whatever it may be, has pure fusion weapons, which we also know is one of the worst possible things for any enemy to have. Is there anything else I can do here, besides be in your way?”

Heads were shaking all over the room. Norcross gave them that cocky grin that so many liberals found unbearable. “Then do what needs to be done; make the country proud of you.” He nodded and exited.

“Now
that
was a curtain line,” Lenny said, under his breath.

“I’m scared that the phrase ‘President Norcross’ is starting to sound sort of comforting,” Heather agreed.

Cameron Nguyen-Peters glanced around. “Defense, security, intelligence people, they’re going to want you in your home departments. Law enforcement and everyone in charge of catching Daybreakers, now we know it’s not over yet, we’ve got to round up as many of them as we can, as fast as we can, and you’ll want to go too. Department of the Future, Department of Energy, Department of Peace—all you analysts, brain trusters, think tankers, all you idea people, plus all the liaisons to civil agencies, if you can,
go home
. If you’re not tracking bombs or tracking Daybreakers, get out of here for now. And . . .” Cam was obviously trying to find a way to say it gently. “. . . look, we’re in the national capital here, and we’re facing an enemy with nuclear weapons; I don’t know why we still exist, in fact. So . . . if you can find a way for your families and loved ones to be out of town—do it. Move your family somewhere safe. Clear? I’m not dismissing anyone, we need everyone here, and you took an oath—but your spouses and kids didn’t, so get them out of the danger zones, and free your mind to concentrate on the mess we have here.”

Heather asked, “How long till the plumes hit the coast?”

“About an hour,” the guy from NOAA said. “Call anybody you have out there and tell them to run if they can get over the mountains, or find someplace to dig in for a couple weeks and hope we can get rescue people out there in that time. But it would be better to run.”

On her way out, she saw that Lenny was scribbling something on his pad; she looked down to see he’d written,
If yr cats okay, my place 2night. U lucky sexy bitch.

Must’ve been kind of an interesting building back when you could see something besides just the dome,
Chris Manckiewicz thought. He’d been inside the concrete and steel barricades around the Capitol many times, but he was thinking of the newsreels from the thirties and forties, when the vast flight of steps had been unimpeded by all the hardware.

Norcross had been summoned to some secret briefing, and Shaunsen was going to hold some big press event in a couple days, but meanwhile Chris had little to do except wipe his gear with lye and rubbing alcohol; if anything “historic” happened, Chris was to shoot it and try to send it, and if it got there, Anne said she’d “probably find a way to use it, and if we do, definitely find a way to pay you.”

So here he was, idly wandering among the historic buildings on the Mall, like any tourist with time to kill.

“You look like a reporter.” The tall woman, her gray hair dyed a fairly natural shade of red, was dressed in knee-high boots and a real old-school jacket/straight skirt/string tie suit, as 1970s as if she’d just walked out of his grandparents’ class pictures. She had a pleasant flat expression. “Am I right?”

“Uh, yeah, how did you know?”

“Because you’re Chris Manckiewicz,” she said. “I’m Rusty Parlotta—I used to work for the
Washington Times
back when there were still paper papers.”

“You were the city editor,” Chris said. “Some people said you were the last of the greats at that.”

She smiled, this time for real. “Actually, what I wanted to talk to you about is, I plan to be the
next
of the greats,” she said. “You’re looking at the new editor and owner of the
Washington Advertiser-Gazette
. I’ve got a buddy who collects and restores old printing machinery. Between what he can make work and what he can build because he understands it, he’s promised me we can put out a paper. Maybe not with photos, even, but a paper. Have you ever written?”

“I write my stories and keep a blog. Yeah, I can turn out a sentence.”

“And are they still paying you?”

“I’ve got cash, if anyone will still take it.” He’d extracted $750, the legal limit, from the one working ATM he’d found, and he had the two grand in hundreds that were all the branch of his bank would give him. Shaunsen had frozen prices, so his money should last a week or so—if the hotel didn’t close its doors, the way most businesses had in the last big price freeze a few years ago.
Didn’t even think about needing black-market barter, but it’s gonna be 2017 all over again, bet on it.

“I thought you might need a job that pays in food and rent.”

“I was just thinking that.”

“Well, the
Washington Advertiser-Gazette
is putting out its first edition tomorrow, while a lot of the higher-tech gear still works. I’ve even got newsboys I’m paying in food for their families, because I grew up Mormon and I have a few months of canned goods and dried beans in my basement. My news staff will be the first eight people to take me up on the offer of a room in my big old wreck of a house—inherited from my folks, and I’m sentimental—plus meals. We’ll go to real money pay as soon as there is real money to pay you with, and you first eight eventually get shares of the biz. Tomorrow morning, there’s going to be kids out on the streets yelling ‘Read all about it in the
Advertiser-Gazette
!’ Want in?”

Chris laughed.

“Is my offer that funny?”

He thought for a moment. “No, it’s great, and I’m taking it. I’m just thinking, forty-eight hours ago I was so fed up with the network that I was looking for an excuse to quit and drive back from Iowa to California. I told myself that with my resumé, I’d have a great deal from someone else in a
day
. And I was
right
.”

“Well, of course you’ll keep your TV job as long as you have an uplink, and they’ll keep sending you money, for whatever that’s worth. But your main job will be turning out words for me. And unlike 247NN, I have fresh cabbage, a cellar full of potatoes, and
tons
of canned organic tomatoes,” she said. “It was a real good year.”

“It just keeps getting better. How many more staff do you need?”

“Three more staff, but one more trip around the Mall and I should have them—it’s crawling with lost reporters whose gear isn’t working, who don’t know what to do. Or maybe we should look into the Capitol. You’re more current than I am, you’ll recognize people. Look for anyone you know is good.”

“I saw CNN’s military affairs specialist go in a few minutes ago—”

“Perfect, let’s go,” she said. “Walk with me.”

He hurried after her.
My god, I watched her covering Bill Clinton on TV when I was a snot-nosed middle-schooler, and she still moves like a missile.

He knew the answer, but he asked, “And am I working tonight?”

“You’d better be or the deal’s off. You’re the national affairs editor. I’d’ve given you police beat or sports, but the guy who wanted both is not only already signed up, he’s an experienced organic gardener himself, and he brought a couple tons of food into the deal.”

“Well, I sure can’t compete with that,” Chris agreed. “National Affairs it is. Are we a Democratic or a Republican paper?”

“Yes, some of the time.”

“I like the way you think, ma’am.”

“Call me ‘ma’am’ again and you’ll be out in traffic yelling ‘Read all about it.’ If there’s traffic.”

The halls of the Capitol were deserted, and Rusty Parlotta shot through them like the ghost of Gloria Steinem, intent on finding her last three staff. Chris, still carrying his TV gear, panted after.
Wow, I’m going to like carrying just a notepad a lot better. Wonder if I can buy a fedora somewhere in this town, and if there’ll be a place in the hatband for the press card?

Everything was still working at Lenny’s apartment, so Heather took the chance to make her calls. At FBI headquarters in San Diego, Bambi listened sympathetically. “I’ll call him in half an hour to give you some time to talk to him,” she said, “but this big old town
sprawls
, you know. He’s at least nine miles away from me. However . . . you know about
my
father?”

“What about him?”

“He was one of the early leaders of the Castle movement, back when some of the crazier survivalists thought the Democrats were going to take their guns away and put them in concentration camps. And he was one of the ones rich enough to build his Castle. Plenty of room there—”

“Oh, dear Jesus, your dad is
Harrison
Castro?”

“Now hiring vassals,” Bambi said, “and there’s always room for a few more, I would guess. I’ll give your dad the password.”

“I don’t know if I want to sell my father into serfdom.”

“Well, it’ll be safe and definitely beat being dead, and I may not be unbiased, but I sort of think my father isn’t such a bad guy.”

Heather half-chuckled. “Okay, truth is, I’m dreading talking my fuzzy biker dad into it, but he’s also patriotic as all get-out and hates hippies.”

“See, they’re made for each other. I promise, Heather, give me your dad’s number, I’ll call him and set him up with my father, and he’ll be fine. Dad’ll probably send guards out to help bring him in.”

“The world’s getting pretty weird, Bambi.”

“Tell me about it. Any word from Edwards’s psychologist buddies about Roth’s seizure?”

“They said it can be a stress reaction in people who are trying to act contrary to a hypnotic suggestion, especially a long-standing deep one. They also said that goes with an increased risk of suicide and alcoholism. Have fun with the dear tyke.”

“I’ll pass the word along to the FBI here, in case it hasn’t gotten through their channels. Good luck, and if this is the last time the phone works, try not to worry.”

“Same to you, Bambi. Thanks for being on the job.”

It only took about ten minutes to persuade her father to accept a berth in Castle Castro; she had a horrible, sinking feeling that her father kind of liked the idea.
Well, at least Bambi won’t have too much opposition to cope with.

While she was talking to her father, the lights went out briefly, and then Lenny’s extensive battery and generator backup kicked in. He wheeled swiftly through his place, turning things off to stretch the emergency systems, but just as Heather hung up with an “I love you, Dad, and you take care of your dumb butt, that’s an order,” the building power unexpectedly returned.