Directive 51 (44 page)

He gestured at the Capitol building. “What better place to find a bunch of old goats supplying the press with cheese?”

“Dammit, you’re the fourth guy who said something like that.”

“We can’t afford just any old future!”

“That’s the Weisbrod I remember. Have a good night!”

He hurried on into the dark canyons between the office buildings, staying in the middle of the street and away from the abandoned cars where someone might jump out, and thought,
Goats on the National Mall.

The only lights visible as he crossed the Capitol Street bridge in the dusk, looking up and down the Anacostia, were the Coleman lanterns of the sentries in the Navy Yard and at Fort McNair.

Roger Pendano looked down at the collection of meds in front of him and thought,
All right, last week, I was taking two a day of the green one, for blood pressure. Now there are four of the green one, three times a day, plus two big whites. So that’ll be one green down the hatch, and the rest down the toilet.

He was starting to feel sweaty and sick, and he probably would not sleep tonight. So what? It would make it easier to act groggy and out of it tomorrow, and
anyway, I have it coming.

For a former conference room with a bed from a nearby hotel dragged into it, and a coat of black paint on the interior window for privacy, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been. With no water to spare for showers—there was barely enough for drinking, cooking, and periodic toilet flushes—Cam had lined up enough hydrogen peroxide and baby wipes so that she could thoroughly bathe Lenny and have enough left over to at least wipe herself down. “Cam said not to spare the wipes on yourself,” Lenny reminded her.

“One date fifteen years ago, and the man thinks he can tell me how I smell.”

“Actually, he said—”

“Yeah, I know, babe. It makes sense. I have to stay clean because you’re going to be touching me. I was making a joke.” She ostentatiously took one more wipe from the glass cookie jar and scrubbed herself carefully.

“What was so fascinating about that jar?”

“Oh, just thinking it’s like the ones in a little coffeehouse in Myrtle Beach, where I like to stop when I’m driving south—and realizing I might never travel that far again.”

“I think you’re clean enough down there, and I don’t have any plastic parts that are going to get close to it.”

“Hah. Only because you haven’t seen some of my favorite tricks.”

“Well, whose fault is that?”

She liked his smile a lot, so it seemed like a good time to bring the big subject up. “I’m going to suggest something so stupid that I can’t believe I’m proposing it, so don’t laugh at me. It involves you and me being in love.”

“Then tell me. You know I won’t laugh.”

“I want to give up birth control.”

“You do remember I might die of plastic rot next week?”

“I can’t forget it. Or that I’m turning forty next year and a whole lot of things they used to be able to do so that a person could be a mother late in life are going to be impossible. Or that I’ve had one lover in my life whose genes I’d be happy to carry.”

He gestured across his whole body.

“Lenny, you told me—I know it’s not genetic.”

“They don’t
think
. You want to bet on some
doctor’s
opinion?”

“Shit, yes, and absolutely, Lenny.
Now
—while the knowledge is still current and you’re alive. You said all the tests show you have normal DNA. If you live—and I want you to, so bad, you know—well, you and I will raise a kid. If you don’t—over the last few thousand years, how many people got started because a soldier had only one more night at home? Or a gun-fighter, or a matador, or anyone in any dangerous occupation? Dad tells me his grandma was a coal miner’s wife, and she never missed a chance with her husband, figuring it could always be the last.” She looked at him a little sideways. “Uh, given how much care you’ve had to take of your health, just to ask—have you ever had the experience unprotected?”

“No, actually. Never had a relationship last long enough—”

“Well, this relationship is going to last the rest of your life, which ought to be long enough.”

“The rest of my life?”

“Three days or forty years, I’m the one that’s going to be there. And you really ought to experience skin-to-skin, more than once, and I’m getting old to start a family but, honestly, Lenny, what the hell? Now watch close, because I happen to love the way you look at me when I’m naked.” She ran her hands up her sides, delighted that he was too distracted to continue arguing.

Strong winds, running thousands of miles ahead of the storm front that was still crossing British Columbia, blew across the Midwest that morning.

St. Paul died of bad luck. A gasoline truck, its contents not yet turned to vinegar or sewage by biotes, had lost its tires and been stranded in front of a T-shirt shop on Snelling Avenue. The owner of the shop, who had not been making any money for at least a year anyway, had departed around noon the day before, slinging up a pack to walk south toward Rochester, where his sister lived. He had left the door unlocked in the back to let people come in out of the cold.

One family had found that unlocked door; that morning, with no breakfast and the water not running, the mother had smoked her last cigarette down to the filter, pinched it out, and thrown it into the wastebasket, where it had smoldered among damp paper towels, old advertising, and some near-empty cans of fabric paint.

The towels nearest the butt dried, and began to burn. The battery smoke detector, not yet eaten by nanoswarm, wailed for a while, and went out. The burning paper towel spread to an old catalog; the old catalog set off some of the fumes from the fabric paint, and the scraps and paper in the basket acted as wicks for the rest.

Anyone in the shop could have put the three-foot-high flames out by pouring a couple of glasses of water into the wastebasket, but there was no one. Sparks from the wastebasket spread to the hanging T-shirts; hanging fabric is very highly flammable, with its enormous exposure of surface area to available oxygen, but the T-shirts were packed so tightly that only the top surfaces caught, and smoldered slowly in the inadequate airflow. Even now, if anyone had walked in, they would have smelled the smoke, pulled the shirts out of the rack, and stomped them out.

No one came; the streets outside were empty, the workers not at work, the mobile residents long since headed out of the city to find somewhere with food and heat, leaving only those who could not move easily—families with young children, the disabled, the old, the mad, the fatally stubborn.

The fire in the wastebasket had died out by the time that the top of one T-shirt burned through, so that the shirt dropped from its hanger, its fall fanning it to flames that licked at the bottoms of the shirts surrounding the gap it had left in the rack; that formed a small chimney, which enlarged as flames raced up the hanging surfaces.

In less than a minute the rack was ablaze. Flames roared up against the ceiling and along the acoustic tile. The metal block in the sprinkler overhead melted, as it was supposed to do, but only the bare dribble of water left in the pipe came out—not nearly enough.

The flames leaped from rack to rack, now, a new rack every few seconds, till the whole shop was hotter than a pizza oven. It grew hot enough to soften the cheap metal fittings, then hot enough to ignite the posters on the walls by radiative heat. Finally it was hot enough to crack the big front window and let out a jet of the white-hot carbon monoxide and partly burned hydrocarbons extracted from the T-shirts and carpets by anoxic roasting.

That hot gas mixed with the outside air and exploded; the explosion shattered the window. Hot gas and air mixed and exploded. Flames roared three stories high. The back door blew wide open hard enough to rip it from its hinges.

Now air could flow from front to back, and in the aftermath of the gas explosion, it rushed in to fill the vacuum. The draft through the shop, with all the fuel well above kindling and waiting only for the oxygen, worked like a blowtorch. White-hot flame poured over and around the abandoned gasoline truck. In minutes, the heat brought the gasoline to a boil, pressurizing the truck with flammable vapors; the hull of the tank grew hotter and hotter until finally the vapor flashed over, and the explosion sprayed just over thirty tons of gasoline into the air and ignited it; every building for two blocks around began to burn.

The fire watch on the steeple of the big old Presbyterian Church on Ayd Mill saw the explosion and flames, and as ordered, she rang the bell and shouted down to the two boys who were her runners. Neither of the fire stations they reached could help; one had no working fire truck, and the other discovered that the hoses they would need to pull water from the little creek and pond half a mile away were rotted. The boys ran back and forth so that the fire chief with the working truck would know to head for the fire station with the unrotted hose.

By the time both fire crews were loading the clean hose onto the hastily-wiped-down truck, the wall of flame whipping westward from Snelling was four blocks long and widening, and advancing at about a block every ten minutes. One truck pumping water from half a mile away wouldn’t have been able to make much of a difference when the fire started; now the whole idea was ludicrous. They evacuated the equipment from the path of the fire; only the haphazard firebreaks formed by freeways and big parking lots stood between the conflagration and downtown St. Paul, and as the wind rose steadily that afternoon, tens of millions of sparks were drifting across them, and some were finding new, flammable homes on the other side.

“So that’s the story,” Bambi said, very quietly to Carlucci, Bolton, and Mensche. “There’s one radio room here, and it’s Dad’s, and he decides what signals go out. And I know from long, long experience what he’s figuring out at the moment—how far can he push before the Feds push back. Once he has that analyzed, then he’ll either be gentle as a kitten, or look the hell out.”

“It sounds like your father has been preparing for Daybreak his whole life,” Carlucci said.

“Yeah. He’s anything but a Daybreaker—more of an old-fashioned Ayn Rand type than anything else, with a mixture of Robert A. Heinlein and probably Sir Walter Scott too—but you could say Daybreak is fulfilling pretty much every dream he ever had. In five years people will be addressing him as ‘Baron’ or something like it, at his insistence. It’s what he’s really always wanted.

“So, here’s the thing. He’ll create law and order all around Castle Castro, and probably extend it up and down the coast—I doubt he’ll worry about where the border is, let alone the county line. People in his sphere will eat and have somewhere safe to sleep. I don’t for a moment suggest that anyone else ought to take over. But . . . Roth is the only Daybreaker we’ve captured so far. She’s a priceless source of information. Do we want the Federal government to have to go through my crazy Baron Dad to access the most important witness it has?”

“So what did you have in mind?” Carlucci asked.

“Is there a covert, hidden-inside-the-message code you can send to the Bureau in Washington? Something to tell them that you need to be ordered to move Roth to somewhere else? Because I’ve got a place, and it’s one Dad will accept. Quattro Larsen, who freeholds Castle Larsen up by Jenner, will pretty much do whatever I tell him—no snickering and giggling about why! Dad will be delighted if I’m ordered to go up there because he’s been trying to set me up with Quattro since I was thirteen, and Quattro and I have had a covert code since we were teenagers, so I can set that up with him too.”

“Well, put that way, of course,” Carlucci said. “Hell yes. How will we get her there?”

“It’s going to be a one-way trip, so it probably isn’t we,” she said. “You don’t want to leave your family here, and the same consideration rules out Terry. So it should be Larry and me.”

“Where’s Jenner?” Larry asked.

“Near the mouth of the Russian River, north of San Fran. Plenty of time to explain once we’re on our way.”

Mensche looked thoughtful. “My daughter, Debbie, is a screwed-up drug addict who has never finished any schooling or held a job, and she’s doing three-strikes time at Coffee Creek.”

“Oregon?”
How to spot a Fed,
Bambi thought.
We know all the big state pens.

“Yeah. Up till this week, she didn’t write or call and didn’t want me to. Her mom would go over from Nevada a couple times a year to see her and send me short notes about her, mostly just that she’s healthy, and not getting out anytime soon. I—well, I’m worried, because I just hope someone remembered to do something for the prisoners when things started to crash, even if it was just to leave doors unlocked. I worry about that. I want to know she’s okay—”

Bambi nodded. “And I’ll get you almost halfway to Coffee Creek. And Quattro can give you a lot of help too, and he will if I ask him.” She reached out and touched his shoulder. “We’ll find out what’s happening with Debbie and make sure she’s okay.” She glanced back at Carlucci. “Well, there you have it. Roth goes because she belongs to the Feds, and we can’t leave her here with a Baron of San Diego who intends to be the Duke of California someday. Larry goes because it’s a one-way trip, and it gets him closer to his family.”