The Last President (42 page)

“We've never allowed weapons near him,” James said. “Well, let me send out some runners.” He thought for a moment. “We'll need to get the interrogation team together to meet us there; that's just safety. Then a carriage for us, I guess, we have him in the super-secure wing of Facility 1 and that's about a mile and a half, unless you want to walk.”

“How about two carriages?” Leslie said. “One for you guys to do old home week in, one for James and I to talk. Because, frankly, we need to talk.”

“I think the budget can stand that,” Heather said. “Considering there's about to be no government of the United States, and we run on its credit.”

James nodded and headed for the messenger's bench at the other end of the building.

“Besides,” Heather said, “I might as well spend it now before it goes away.”

Bambi smiled. “Spoken like a true bureaucrat. You really think you're going to lose your budget?”

“Oh, hell, yeah. One big funding source is going to disappear when the Tempers turn into the Christian States of America. Who knows how long the PCG will want to keep funding us, especially once Allie wakes up and finds out I prevented her from being President?”

Bambi snorted. “Jeez. Our old office politics are now running the continent. Well, look, hon, I'm a duchess. You were a pretty good bureaucrat, and I bet you'll make a pretty good vassal. And one advantage of being a duchess is, le budget,
c'est moi
.”

• • • 

“Well,” James said, closing the carriage door, “You said you wanted to talk.”

“Yeah.” She reached out and grasped his wrist. “James, I—shit. I don't have any idea what I feel. I mean, he almost killed me.”

“He did. For what it's worth, he's gone after me or one of the others with his bare hands, or silverware he stole, or a piece of broken plate or a garotte he tore out of his underwear. More times than I can count. About a third of the time he's plain old, gentle, nerdy, numbers-and-graphs-loving Arnie. Another third, he's a treacherous evil snake of a liar, but very persuasive, and he sounds just like he does when he's himself. And the last third . . . well, no predicting, but he's tried to kill us, sometimes by biting out our carotids, sometimes by sounding as reasonable and mellow as a stoned kindergarten teacher. And he jumps from one to the other and there's no warning.”

“Yeah. But . . . okay, whether you feel good about it or not, this is about me.” She sighed, and played with Wonder's ears; he panted and looked up at James.

“Yeah,” James said, “I knew it was going to be.”

“
Why
did you save Arnie Yang's life? I mean, James, just this once, I'll admit I know how you feel about me, that you haven't changed, you're still forcing yourself to be the best friend I could ever wish for, but that's not what you want—”

He sat up stiffly, looked out the window, and kept his voice very flat. “You're right, we don't talk about all that.”

“But—”

“You wanted me to let him be hanged, as revenge for what he almost did to you? Don't think I didn't consider that. I would honest to god have
enjoyed
hearing that cable snap his neck. Because he tried to frame you, because he betrayed Ecco, because he fooled me, because he smiled right into the faces of people who thought he was their friend and were trying to be good friends to him. Ten million reasons I would have liked to see him dangling dead.

“But I did it all, anyway, instead. I arranged with MaryBeth to handle the switch, and got the note from Allie that we could be sure would trigger a Daybreak seizure. Then when he had the attack, MaryBeth and I took him to the infirmary. We only needed a couple of minutes because we had a prisoner we hadn't logged. Deb and Larry Mensche knew a guy about Arnie's size and coloration, who had been a Daybreaker, and killed his own family while he was under it, and didn't want to live. They were waiting with him in the infirmary, and they had already dosed him up on barbiturates and got him all weepy and sleepy and hooded him, and that's the man we took back out to ride in the wagon to his hanging.

“Meanwhile Jason and Beth took Arnie Yang to the high security section we had just set up in Facility 1; there are about a dozen high-level deeply infected Daybreakers in there at any given time, and the roster tends to change pretty fast because what we do to interrogate them, um, uses them up.”

“Kills them?”

“If they don't find a way to kill themselves, or die of a related accident, or turn into gaping, drooling mannequins.” He rubbed his face. “It's one hell of a job for an ex-librarian to take on, but there was no one else for it.”

“Did it have to be done?”

“Yeah, I still think so. If we'd won, anyway, I think it would have been justified. Anyway, it was the fake Arnie that went back out on the gurney, up the steps, and down the drop. Nobody saw his face till MaryBeth and I took his hood off, and you know, with the weights on his feet and using aircraft cable on such a long drop, we had turned his face into one big swollen bruise, with a big black tongue sticking out and red eyeballs bulging like Ping-Pong balls. No one who had been friends with Arnie was going to look closely. We let them have one glimpse, then MaryBeth signed the death certificate, I fed fake-Arnie head down into the incinerator—supposedly to prevent his grave becoming a pilgrimage site—and we made it work. That's how we did it, and no, at the time, I didn't tell you about it. You'd just been released from death row yourself and you were drinking and partying like all of a sudden there
was
a tomorrow.”

“When I've been scared, I like a lot of sex. And I'd never been so scared before.”

“I know. I understood that, Leslie. We've been friends a long time.”

“Yeah. I try to keep you from hearing too much about it, or seeing me when I'm that way.”

“I appreciate it. Anyway, the point is, I didn't hang Arnie, and I decided not to hang Arnie, but it had nothing to do with you. Not that I wasn't angry enough, just that it made no sense, if I was trying to do my job running an intelligence service. I certainly didn't save Arnie because I loved him, or forgave him, or wanted to spend time in his company. So I'm sorry but for once in my stupid, infatuated, never-learn life, this
wasn't
about you.”

Leslie leaned forward, looking at him with an expression he couldn't read, astonishment, maybe, even shock. “James, James—shit, I'm handling this so badly, I was trying to be careful not to hurt you. I just wanted to say . . . James, you didn't have to keep it secret from me, you don't need my forgiveness because there's nothing to forgive,
I understand
, James.”

She reached over and clutched his arm; he looked at her hand as if it had magically appeared there. “James,” she said again. “What I wanted to tell you was . . . of
course
you had to keep him alive, of
course
you had to have him for interrogation, because you are running an intelligence organization, with very fucking likely the fate of civilization at stake, and he's the richest possible source of intelligence about the enemy you could have, the senior analyst from our own side infected by Daybreak.

“
Naturally
he was telling you that you had to hang him; it was the same thing as the suicide pills any spy carries. Executing him looked like the stupidest piece of melodrama in the world, just a show for the mob in the street because our big dumb sloppy public still hasn't recovered from being raised on movies and comic books and they had this fixation that they needed to see ‘justice' done. Justice? Emotional satisfaction because it makes a tidy story. Nothing to do with what works or what matters. Just melodramatic ‘justice,' one more way people made themselves stupid, so stupid they couldn't keep civilization going when the first bunch of dipshits came along and wanted to take it down. And I just wanted to apologize to you.”

“You? You apologize to me? For
what
?”

“I really thought you were that dumb. I thought you were so infatuated that you felt like you had to be loyal when it didn't make any sense, and I thought . . . well, it was something I felt for a long time. Maybe ever since we became friends, ever since you got that crush.” She was looking down, now, embarrassed herself. “I had the impression that you thought I was a little bit dumb, myself, I mean, nice and articulate and all, but not really capable of thinking and deciding like a mature person, and your life was built around pleasing me even though you thought I was silly and dumb. Like, patronizing self-sacrifice, you know? Doing what you thought I wanted because you didn't think I was smart enough to see what was right. So when you hanged Arnie Yang, or staged the hanging, anyway, I thought you did it for me because you thought I was stupid enough to want it and demand it.”

The carriage rolled another couple of blocks before James ventured to say, “And now you're thinking . . . or feeling . . . differently?”

“You used the staged execution to convince Daybreak we didn't have that intel source,” she said. “Didn't you?”

“Yes, actually. At least that got some mileage out of that silly piece of theatre.”

“Well, I think that bit was brilliant, and pretty damned cool, and I'm proud of you.” The hand moved from his arm to caress his cheek; startled, he looked straight into her eyes, as he rarely dared to do for fear of revealing his feelings.

She smiled and winked. “Maybe we should have some long talks, later. Meanwhile, let's go see if we can get anything more out of that little asshole.”

• • • 

James had invited the whole “senior interrogation team,” which meant Jason, Beth, and Izzy. It was rare that they all worked together, so they knew something was up even before he showed up with Leslie, Bambi, and Heather. “So today's the day we come clean?” Jason asked. He was grinning like a child at Christmas.

“It just might be the end of everything,” James said. “Or the beginning.” He looked around the group. “Now, everyone be ready. And if you're carrying any concealed weapons as a backup, now is the time to leave them behind. He's got literally inhuman abilities to detect them and he can move faster than you'd believe—I don't know if that's Daybreak, insanity, or that he spent so many years in martial arts. If you have a knife on you somewhere, he'll take it from you and use it on all of us before you know it.”

“No shit,” Beth said. “I used to carry a little blackjack for just in case. Arnie was talking reasonable as could be this one time, just like the small talk before we started, and holy fuck, Jason slapped my blackjack out of Arnie's hand and put him into a half-nelson strangle, or I'd've been dead, and the first I knew that my blackjack wasn't in my coat pocket was when I saw it flying across the room.”

Heather and Bambi exchanged glances; Bambi pulled out a steel spring whip from somewhere, and Heather a short set of nunchaku.

“You can pick'em up on your way out,” James said, locking them into the box by the front door.

When James slid the door panel open, he stood well back, then looked through carefully. Arnie Yang sat on a single-piece poured concrete bench, big enough to be his bed as well as his seat, at the center of the floor in a windowless room. “Coming in, Arnie. Big group.”

“Good, it's been lonely.”

When Arnie saw all of them, he said, “Something has happened since we talked last. Did Pale Bluff fall?”

“Yes,” James said.

“I had thought that sometime soon, there would be a bigger group to see me. It makes me happy to see you again, Heather, Bambi. Leslie, you probably won't believe me, or accept it ever, but I really want to say I'm sorry about everything.”

“Actually I do believe you,” Leslie said. “That you want to say that, and even that you mean it. You know I'll probably never accept it?”

“I know. I just wanted you to know I offered my apology, sincerely.” He paused a long time. “So Pale Bluff has been destroyed. I was rather thinking you would have brought along General Phat.”

“He died in Pale Bluff,” James said, very quietly. “And nobody is here to gape at you. We want to ask your advice, just as I have regularly asked it. Could you say one of the phrases, please, while we watch you?”

“‘Daybreak is a mind virus,'” Arnie recited. “‘Daybreak exists only for its own purpose. Daybreak's purpose is to degrade and destroy the human race, everyone I love, and me. Daybreak is entirely evil. The world must be rid of Daybreak so that it can resume the development of technological civilization, whose benefits are the birthright of the whole human race.' Hey, no seizure, today
is
a special day.”

“Or Daybreak doesn't want you to have that clear period like you get after a seizure,” Beth said. “You know it could be either, and we don't know any more than you do if it's got you right now. But you're right all the same, it's a good sign.”

“Well, then,” James said. “Here's the situation. Pale Bluff is burned, orchards and all, and will probably never be rebuilt. The Army of the Wabash is so far behind Lord Robert's horde that there's really no likelihood that they'll ever catch them; they just can't move as fast and there's still more than a hundred miles. They can loot their way down the south bank of the Ohio and arrive at Paducah in better shape than they are now. Then they can bypass Paducah or overwhelm it, and that's the last thing between them and the really good looting on the other side of the Mississippi. So if you were right that this is basically one last giant suicide raid to try to crash what's left of civilization on this continent, well, we've probably lost our last chance to stop them before the blizzards start on the Great Plains next fall, and it's only May.