Armageddon Crazy

TEN

Mansard

"Praise be to larry faithful, government without end."

"You should watch your mouth, boss. We're on their turf now."

"Screw them all. They need me more than I need them." There were ten days to go to the Day of National Reconciliation, and Charlie Mansard was chain smoking and carrying a hip flask. He was standing beside Jimmy Gadd on a drafty outer runway in the military security section of Newark Airport, watching soldiers riding walkers and driving forklifts, breaking down the cargo mass of a C87. They had watched the impossibly bulbous aircraft come in to land. It seemed like a miracle that anything so heavy could ever lumber into the air. It was finished in winter warfare camouflage. Mansard had wondered for what ambitious scheme it had been originally commissioned. Probably some wishful but eventually aborted invasion of Canada. The government no longer had the trillions that the Reagan era had had to throw around, but considering the nation's straitened circumstances, the military continued to get most of the toys it wanted and still managed to remain ineffectual. After everything that had been poured into the Southern Border War, the Mexicans and their Havana Pact allies still held their slice of Texas, including Corpus Christi and, the crowning humiliation, San Antonio. There had been mutterings about nuking the greasy papist bastards, but everyone was well aware that any use of the aging nuclear arsenal would provoke immediate retaliation from Russia, Japan, and probably China. A red, white, and green Mexican tricolor with its gold eagle continued to flutter over the Alamo.

As the side panels of the C87 were removed and the containers were slid from the plane's interior framework, Mansard realized that he was actually getting his own small slice of the pie. Jimmy Gadd felt it, too.

"It's goddamn Christmas. I've never seen so much stuff. I didn't know there was this much hardware in the country."

"Our leaders move in mysterious ways."

"Half this stuff is technically illegal."

"Exactly."

A laden, olive-green forklift hooted at them, and they stepped out of the way. A walker followed with a redheaded corporal effortlessly providing the motion base for its gargantuan arms and legs.

"Those things always remind me of the old Toho monster movies. Godzilla heading out to eat Tokyo, remember? Shall we follow it into the hangar and watch the presents being unwrapped?"

Inside the big military hangar, soldiers were swarming over the containers from the C87, reducing them to their smaller components, which were then loaded onto waiting trucks for the second stage of their trip to the construction site. They would be trucked to Hoboken and transferred to pontoons, finally to be floated downriver to Liberty Island, where the enormous floating projector units were being assembled. The island had been closed to the public – not that it saw many visitors anymore. Access had been limited ever since the Daughters of Islam had tried to blow up the statue in '04. For Mansard, it had been turned into a full-scale military camp, complete with patrol boats, helicopters, and a floodlit perimeter. He had become king of his own island and he was loving every minute. His behavior had become shamelessly Napoleonic, and the military, in its turn, appeared to lap it up. Jimmy Gadd had his own explanation.

"The poor bastards probably welcome any diversion from being shot at by Zapata Legion snipers with those nasty little Cucaracha missiles."

Supply sergeants pulled cases off the line at random and checked that the contents matched the manifest and had arrived intact. Mansard and Gadd strolled toward one of those inspections. The lids had been removed from four aluminum coffins. Inside, four Sony DL-70s nestled in beds of blue foam rubber. Jimmy Gadd blinked in surprise.

"Those are DL-70Cs. We've always been lucky to get the basic model. They don't have these anywhere in South America yet."

Mansard laughed. "Are you suggesting that our holy leaders are doing covert business with the heathen japper?" A thought struck him, and he looked sharply at Gadd. "You do know how to operate these new wonders from the rising sun?"

Gadd grinned and shrugged. "I can read a manual with the best of them."

Mansard looked askance at him. "Christ, no wonder I'm an alcoholic."

"You're losing your sense of humor."

"That's hardly surprising."

Gadd was looking at his watch. "Listen, things seem to be running smoothly out here. Why don't we head back to the site and see that my guys aren't getting in any more beefs with the army?"

Mansard nodded. The downside to all the technical largess coming to them via the military was that the production had been turned into a military operation. The disrespect and loose camaraderie that held together Mansard's team and turned them into a fiercely efficient unit when they wanted to be had clashed badly with the army technicians' concepts of organization and discipline. There was yet to be a fistfight, but screaming matches were a daily occurrence, and there had been one unfortunate incident that was already being referred to as the Donut Strike. One of the roots of the friction was that Mansard's people handled quality control and invariably had the last say. The military did not take kindly to being ordered around by civilians, particularly civilians who looked like hairy subversives. They were also not used to working with women. All women had been removed from the military in the first three months of the Faith-fid administration while Mansard had always taken a perverse delight in doing all the equal opportunity hiring that he could get away with.

Despite all that – and to Mansard's surprise – the work was slightly ahead of schedule. Those Christian soldiers seemed to get the job done if only by sheer weight of numbers. If nothing went weird on them and open warfare did not break out between soldiers and civilians, they could ground test the power rigs in four days. Charlie Mansard, despite his glib cynicism, was filled with a mounting excitement.

As they walked back to the limousine, Mansard started quizzing Gadd about the new Sony modification.

"What will it do to the color/light density?"

"Should beef it up."

"By much?"

"I haven't looked at the specs, but I imagine by quite a bit. This is Sony. They won't put out a new model just for the sake of it."

"So we could have ourselves an almost solid image?"

"Close."

Mansard clenched his fists gleefully. "Great. I've got real plans for this show."

Gadd looked at him curiously. "Do you know something that I don't?"

Charlie Mansard laughed. "Who knows? This is going to be the biggest sky image anyone's ever seen. We might just touch off the Day of Judgment."

Gadd snorted. "Your hired help have commented on how, these days, you seemed to think you're Hitler. We didn't think that you'd progressed to God. "

Mansard ignored the crack. "Nobody seems to have noticed that they're letting us play with dynamite. I mean, what happened when we put up the Four Horsemen?"

"There was a bloody great riot."

"I thought we were dead after that. I thought they'd close us down for sure and outlaw sky walkers as works of Satan. Instead, they hire us to build something four times as big. What they don't seem to realize is that we could get four times the reaction."

"The images will be out on the water. That should soften the impact a little."

"Quite the reverse. Remember, the barges will be moving. For those who are just busting a gut to believe in that kind of thing, it'll look like the Beasts of Revelations are advancing on the city. The final fall of Babylon-on-the-Hudson."

Jimmy Gadd looked at his boss suspiciously. "You're getting a little strange, Charlie. What do you think is going to come out of all this?"

For someone of his size, Mansard was almost coy. "I don't know. Maybe the fall of the government." Gadd shook his head. "You're working too hard."

Kline

Cynthia Kline was worried. It was four days since she had heard anything from Harry Carlisle. She was aware that a police officer might be called away to some situation in which it would be impossible to make personal phone calls, but there was something about his silence that did not seem to be quite right. She told herself, over and over, mat she was not simply being the kind of neurotic who needs a lover to phone her four or five times a day. It was some sixth sense, or maybe just an extension of her own instinct of self-preservation, warning her that things were taking a disturbingly odd turn. It had started with the predawn call summoning her to Astor Place. Harry had left first, and she had waited; she could not afford to be seen walking out with him. The drunken nights when she had been Longstreet's protegee had done enough to her reputation around the building. She had sat on the bed and smoked a cigarette before finally pulling on her topcoat and going out into the empty streets.

The scene at C86 had been one of near chaos. Laura, who had been appointed pro tern supervisor, explained that they were trying to contain a computer virus and sent her directly to her terminal. The monitor was flashing bizarre dialog boxes that insisted that she enter complex thirty-two symbol codes. She had never seen anything like it. She was simply some kind of interface. She had no idea what was going on. The monitors told her what to do, and she did it. She had no idea if the virus was winning or losing. For all she knew it might be the virus issuing her instructions.

It was the not knowing what she was doing that quickly killed any kind of excitement or sense of participation. There might have been an epic cyberfight going on, but since she did not understand it, she could hardly feel a part of it. Hers was but to keyboard. After an hour, she was profoundly bored and resentful at being dragged out of a warm bed and away from Harry for such nonsense. It was quite possible that the dialog boxes and her increasingly resentful responses were nothing more than computer make-work, part of some demented deacon exercise.

On her first break, she had run into Laura in the rest room, and the second oddity had occurred. Laura, who had been staring at herself in the mirror as Cynthia had walked in, glanced up.

"Weird night."

"You can say that again."

"Do you even know what a computer virus is?"

Cynthia decided that the best thing would be to play it like an airhead. "I'm not sure any of them really know what a computer virus is."

There was a pause as Laura worked on her makeup. She wore a great deal by the standards of the time and place. She looked at Cynthia's reflection in the mirror. "Are you still going out with that cop?"

"Uh-huh."

"You know it's not too smart, don't you?"

"I know that. I've been thinking of breaking it off, but I do kind of like him."

Laura was preparing to leave. "I'd look after myself if I were you. That cop of yours may not be around much longer."

Cynthia's head turned sharply. "What do you mean by that? "

Laura obviously realized that she had said too much. She was already on her way to the door. "Nothing, honey. I just meant that he has a knack of getting himself into trouble."

She was through the door and gone. Cynthia wanted to go after her and shake the truth out of her, but attacking even a temporary supervisor would put her in serious trouble. What had the bitch meant by he 'may not be around much longer'? Laura slept with that bastard Spencer. Had she heard something? People did, all too frequently, disappear.

Cynthia was still worrying about the remark as she went back to her terminal. In fifteen minutes, however, all thoughts of Harry were temporarily driven from her mind.

A cold hand clutched at her stomach. It was the signal. The green letters were pulsing right there on her primary screen. After maybe five seconds, they faded, to be replaced by a simple instruction.

PREPARE TO LOAD PROGRAM IN THIRTY SECONDS.

She had to stop herself from sneaking a glance at the security cameras. That was the most common method of giving oneself away. She had to be calm and load the diskette from the Lefthand Path as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

She already had the diskette concealed in her desk rack in among a lot of harmless subprograms. She removed it and placed it next to the input drive. No alarms sounded, and nobody seemed to have noticed anything.

She clicked in the diskette and tapped out the code. 771-36971-2458-666. She had memorized the numbers. The screen went blank for about fifteen seconds, and then the meaningless dialog boxes came back. Everything was normal again. For a full half hour she waited for something to happen. She had half expected the whole system to crash the moment the guerrilla program was loaded, but there was not even a flicker, nor did anyone come and place a hand on her shoulder and take her away. She had done what the organization had asked, but she had no more idea of what had been achieved than she had about her work for the deacons.

The next strange occurrence was at lunchtime. The deacons came for Laura. There were four of them. It seemed less as if they were arresting her, than as if they had some very bad news and were taking her somewhere to break it to her. They were formal and awkward. They seemed frightened to touch her. Deacons were never like that when they were making a bust. Laura did not come back. All afternoon, the rest room muttered rumors. It was something to do with Spencer. He was dead. He had been arrested. He had done something terrible and was on the run. There were photographs of him and Laura. Cynthia could not find it in herself to feel pleased.

Things slackened off in the late afternoon. The screens stayed blank for minutes at a time. Cynthia took the chance to call Harry. He could not be located. She had an immediate twinge of unease. The unease carried on all evening and through the night. When she arrived at work the next day, there was a message waiting for her from a PD captain called Parnell. On the tape, he sounded profoundly uncomfortable.

"Harry Carlisle asked me to give you this message. He's hit a difficult patch in an investigation. He's had to go to ground for a few days and he won't be able to call you. He doesn't want you to worry."

He doesn't want me to worry. So pick someone to deliver your messages who can lie effectively. Where the hell are you, Harry Carlisle? He was not the kind to dump her through a third party. Something must have happened to him. She caught herself in the middle of contemplating in anguish all the grisly fates that might have befallen him and reined in her imagination. Lusting after Carlisle might well be her downfall. He was a cop, and he was in the unit working on the Lefthand Path. The other and very logical explanation for his behavior was that he was on to her.

Carlisle

Harry Carlisle found it very pleasant to drift on the black lake. Thoughts slipped through his fingers like sparkling drops of water. He could not focus; he could not form sentences or string ideas together. Nothing made any sense, but that really didn't matter. He was in a place between consciousness and sleep where nothing really mattered. He knew that he was lying on a bed, although even that was, at times, far from certain. There were moments, sometimes moments that seemed to stretch forever, when the clean white sheets stretched into Arctic snow-fields or expanses of hot white sand. Always, in the end, though, they melted back into the comforting womb waters of the black lake. He knew that people came and looked at him. He was vaguely aware of the murmur of their voices. He knew that they were talking about him, maybe even talking to him, but he could not make out their words. His most frequent visitor was the figure in white. She came regularly, hovering for long periods at the edge of his vision. The word 'nurse' seemed to fit, although sometimes she was a lazily gliding sea bird or a floating cloud in the blue of a summer day.

Every now and then a bubble of danger would burst from the dark depths of his lake. Phrases would crowd in on him. There was. He had to. He needed to. Move. The world outside was.

But the phrases were wrong and they soon went away. The world outside was not, and he did not have to do anything.

Speedboat

Speedboat drank beer, watched TV, and wondered what was going on in New York. He watched a lot of TV to try to stop himself thinking about his own situation, but it did not work. His own situation was so profoundly disastrous that it refused to leave him alone for any more than a few minutes at a time. Even getting drunk, something he only rarely did in the normal world, was not much of a help. He was screwed, and there was no way to avoid facing it.

He had taken the creaking DC 15 to Buffalo. He had been so jangled by the clerk who had inspected his documents that he had gone through the process like a zombie. All he had wanted to do at that moment was to get the hell away from La Guardia; boarding the plane had seemed, at the time, to be the line of least resistance. Even when he had reached Buffalo, he had had no formulated plan. He had taken a cab and, on the advice of the driver, checked into a rundown motel not too far from the airport. The manager had taken one look at him and doubled the normal room rate. Later he was to find out that the manager was paid off to ensure that guests like him did not have their documentation looked at too closely.

He had left it for two days before he had called the number the clerk had written on the hundred-dollar bill, the number of the organization that supposedly might get him across the border. As always, he was looking out for a possible setup. Not that his caution seemed to have helped him so far. The woman who had answered had been noncommittal. She had asked him where he was, and when he had mentioned the name of the motel, she had laughed.

"We have a lot of clients who stay there."

She had told him that he would be contacted.

He had made a couple of forays into downtown Buffalo, but mostly he stayed in the motel. He had forgotten how things had become outside of New York City. There were women on the street in white linen caps and long black dresses down to their ankles, and men in baggy black suits and flat, broad-brimmed hats. They looked like the audience at a witch burning. Maybe that was what they did for fun on a Saturday night. He had copped ten greenies in the toilet of a beat-up, bad-neighborhood bar that looked as if it had once been a topless joint, but they had not even made a dent in his nerves. He had also inspected the border, from a healthy distance. It had looked even more formidable in reality, with its minefields, its wire, watchtowers, and steel wall, than it had looked on TV or in magazines. It required no effort to remember that the Herod gunships swinging low over the wide, bulldozed scar of no-man's-land would shoot at anything that moved. It seemed impossible that anyone could cross such a barrier of instant and automated death. When the Canadian border had first been closed and fortified, the White House PR people had tried to sell the country on a name for it: the Line of Truth. But that ridiculous name had refused to stick. A deacon car had come slowly up the road that overlooked the frontier. They appeared to be taking photographs of anyone who paused to look at it for too long. Speedboat had quickly made himself scarce.

Now he watched TV and waited for the phone to ring. He could get beer, booze, and pizza delivered, so he had no reason to leave his room. From all he had seen, he wanted as little as possible to do with the citizens of Buffalo. Apart from anything else, they might decide that he would be a fit subject for a Saturday night barbecue. He certainly did not see himself asking around if anyone knew somebody who would get him into Canada. If smuggling people across the border was an industry in the city, there were no signs of it. From a couple of conversations with the manager and the boy who brought his beer, he started to form the impression that the real underground industry was ripping off fugitives who were waiting in vain. The woman from the hundred-dollar bill had called after six days. The message had not been encouraging.

"The canuks seem to be running some kind of military exercise on their side of the falls. The army has responded by beefing up the defenses here."

"So I wait?"

"These things don't happen overnight."

Speedboat's concern over what was going on in New York was not a matter of either boredom or nostalgia. He was going to run out of money in approximately two weeks, and getting back to the city was his only failsafe option. If he could not get out of the country, Manhattan was about the only place he could survive.

The TV was hardly informative, but, reading between the lines, it was pretty obvious that some strange shit was going down. First there had been the freakout and hoopla over the attempt on Aden Proverb's life. Speedboat was amazed that it got on TV at all. They had blanked out the entire riot outside the Garden as if it had never happened. After the Proverb incident, the wall went up again with a vengeance. The networks were smothered in a barrage of happyvision, puppies, kittens, old folks, miracle cures, and just plain miracles. Jesus was everywhere. He even smote the enemy. There was footage of a large squad of Mexican and Cuban prisoners who had surrendered after a fierce firefight forty miles south of Austin. Speedboat was certain that he had seen that footage before.

The big news was the latest Faithful propaganda fest. The president going to take over Liberty Island for something that was being trumpeted as a Day of National Reconciliation. It was being pitched as a very big deal. There was an item about it, or at least a reference to it, on practically every show. That, in itself, was a definite indication that something was slipping out of sync in the world of the true believers. National reconciliation was quite a mouthful for a regime that never admitted there was the slightest dissent in the ranks. They would not be pissing away some millions on a TV special from right in the heart of New York, a town never loved by Fundamentalist Christians, unless there was a potential major problem and it was centered right there. A thought struck him. Maybe that was why the Canadians were massing troops on the other side of the border. It was not uncommon for the Canadians to know more about what was going on inside the United States than the country's own population knew. Indeed, there were times when it was hard to know less.

Speedboat's beer was all gone. He had a sudden urge to hurl the bottle through the TV screen. He was bored with all the madness. He restrained himself with difficulty. He told himself firmly that it was no time to get stir crazy. Time might move slowly holed up in this cruddy motel, but it did not move half as slowly as time moved in Joshua.

Winters

Winters woke to a deacon's worst nightmare. Dreisler and what looked like half of Internal Affairs was at the foot of his bed. Short of Satan on the bedpost, that was as bad as it got. He had a blinding headache, and his mind was still fuzzy from whatever they had used to sedate him. He struggled to sit up in bed.

Dreisler seemed amused. "Good afternoon, Deacon Winters."

"Good afternoon, sir."

Winters did not know whether it was day or night. The hospital room he was in – if, in fact, it was a hospital – was a windowless white cubical. A neodevotional print of Lazarus being raised from the dead hung in a cheap plastic frame on the wall beside him.

"Where am I?"

Dreisler ignored him. "You've been very careless, Winters."

Physical pain aside, Winters was very frightened. He had heard all the horror stories of what happened to erring deacons who fell into the hands of Dreisler's IA headhunters.

"Careless?" he asked.

"It's one thing to go out and engage in illegal torture and executions. In some parts of the service, they look on that kind of behavior as the mark of a healthy enthusiasm on the part of an up-and-coming deacon. To lose your whole team, however, on your very first mission is just plain careless."

"I…"

Dreisler sat down on the bed, fastidiously adjusting the knife-edge creases in his pants. There was something almost friendly in the move, a vague suggestion of the desire to confide. " You'd probably like to talk to me."

"I don't know. I 'm confused."

"Of course you're confused. You're also in a bit of a double bind. You'd like to tell me all about what happened, but you're well aware that that would violate your mortal oath to the Secret Order of Holy Magicians. I have this problem, Winters. My reputation tends to precede me, and people seem to be very anxious, as a rule, to tell me things. In your case, though, you also have to consider the reputation of the Magicians. They can get very creative with oath-breakers."

"I wasn't – "

"No, I know you weren't. It was Spencer who was in charge. He should have made sure that the building was secure. Unfortunately, Spencer's dead, as are all the others."

Winters knew that he would blurt out everything in the end. What would happen to him then?

"It was the Lefthand Path," he said.

"How do you know that?"

"The one who hit me with the gun butt," he yelled it out. "Lefthand Path, mother – " He could not say it in front of Dreisler.

Dreisler laughed. "You only have his word for it."

"What are you going to do with me?"

Dreisler stood up. "Normally there would be disciplinary action in a case like this. Fortunately these are troubled times, and I need all the men I can trust. I can't spare you."

Winters was surprised. "You trust me?"

"Yes, Winters, I trust you."

Winters could not read his expression.

"In fact, I trust you so much that I need you to be in a key position on the Day of National Reconciliation. It's possible that the heretics will use the occasion to cause trouble."

"What position will that be?"

Dreisler shook his head. "Get your head fixed first. You have a skull fracture. You'll get your orders when you're up on your feet again."

"Thank you, sir."

Dreisler threw his coat over his shoulders. "Don't thank me yet, boy. You may not like these orders."

He walked around the bed, then hesitated as if he had just remembered something.

"By the way, do you have any idea what happened to Carlisle?"

Winters shook his head. The motion hurt. "I didn't see him after the attack started, and then I was out cold."

Dreisler nodded. "It doesn't matter."

Carlisle

The black lake was gone. There was spring sunlight streaming in through a window that was secured by three serviceable steel bars. The drugs had worn off, leaving Harry Carlisle with a queasy hunger in his stomach and a gritty feeling under his eyelids. The old-fashioned sash window was open about five inches at the bottom, and a breeze was blowing in. That felt good. Each deep breath helped clear the narcotic residue from his brain. Goddamn, but if mere was ever a time that he needed his brain functioning to the max, it was right then. Where the hell was he? And, even more important, what was his status? The last time he had looked, he had been dead meat. Then, in what had seemed to be the nick of time, a bunch of guys, shooting off guns and yelling that they were the Lefthand Path, had rushed in and rescued him. Why they had rescued him was another matter. In the best of all possible worlds, they would have saved him simply because he was an unfortunate victim of deacon oppression. Unfortunately, it was not the best of all possible worlds, and he feared that his saviors, whoever they were, also had a use for him. He could only pray that it would not be as a mutilated corpse.

He took stock of his situation. He was lying on a metal-framed, hospital-style bed. It had been set up in the corner of a large institutional room. There were three barred windows, dirty green walls, and a wide expanse of dusty floor. Except for the one near his bed, the half-dozen light fittings had no bulbs. They came with the kind of cheap metal shades that were used in schools and government offices. He decided to get out of bed and explore a little more. Someone had dressed him in a white cotton hospital smock. He stood a little gingerly but experienced no difficulty. His legs felt weak, but they were able to support him, and he did not suddenly become nauseous or dizzy. So far, so good.

He recognized nothing in the view from the window; all he could see was the dirty wall of a factory building across a vacant lot. He could have been in any industrial neighborhood, anywhere. As far as he could estimate, he was on the third or fourth floor. The door at the far end of the room proved to be locked, as he had expected. A quick scan turned up no cameras, sensors, or microphones. Foiled for the moment, he went back and sat on the bed.

Half an hour later, when he was starting to wonder if someone was trying to bore him to death, he heard the sound of footsteps outside the door, followed immediately by the beeping of the lock. Carlisle tensed. Now what?

It turned out to be a nurse – the figure in white from his drugged haze. She wore a starched white uniform in the demure style of the times and had a scrubbed, no-nonsense face. She carried a tray containing scrambled eggs, toast, and tea.

"So we're up and around, are we?"

Carlisle nodded. "So it would seem."

She put the tray down on the bed.

"You're probably feeling a little queasy, so eat this. It'll help." She straightened up again. "I know you must have a hundred questions, but I'm not authorized to answer any of them. You're going to have to wait until someone more important comes to see you."

"There is maybe one thing."

"What's that?" She looked a little impatient. She clearly had not been hired for her bedside manner.

"It's kind of boring sitting here. Could I get a newspaper or magazine or something?"

The nurse looked at him coldly. "Perhaps you'd like a TV brought in?"

"I just asked."

She relented a little. "I'll see what I can do."

"Also…"

"What?"

"Where do I go to the bathroom?"

"Look under the bed."

The magazine or newspaper did not appear, and Carlisle spent a long time looking out of the window. A pigeon had attempted to land on the windowsill, but flew off in a panic when it saw him. Eventually there were more footsteps beyond the door and another sequence of beeps. He turned, expecting to see the nurse – carrying, he hoped, a copy of People or Timeweek - and instead saw something in the doorway that made him wonder if he was having a drug flashback.

"What the hell?"

Matthew Dreisler smiled like the Devil himself. "Surprised to see me?"

"You're not quite what I expected."

"Didn't you know that I'm everywhere?"

Carlisle scowled. Obviously the game was continuing. "All hearing and all seeing?"

"You're getting the idea."

"I suppose you run the Lefthand Path, too?"

"In a manner of speaking, I do."

Carlisle slowly nodded. "Oookay."

Dreisler stood smiling. Carlisle sat on the bed feeling like a very helpless rat in a very complex maze. He could easily believe that Dreisler was behind everything that had happened to him. It was some twisted behavioral experiment that was pushing him through each horrible stage of some monstrous Kafkaesque nightmare.

"I expect you'd like to know what's going on."

The words were said with such bright lack of concern that Carlisle suddenly wanted to start screaming. Okay, I give up. You've driven me mad. Unfortunately, they had not. He could still keep himself under control. With an effort, he formed his face into an expression of caution.

"Are you going to tell me?"

"That's exactly why I'm here."

The story was nothing short of incredible. Harry Carlisle had heard some incredible stories in his time, but this one was head and shoulders above the rest.

"I'm organizing a little revolution."

"You are? When?"

Dreisler walked slowly over to the window. He was using the large empty space almost as a set, going for the full dramatic effect. He was the debonair secret policeman, master of intrigue, Carlisle was the bleary political prisoner. The bare, dusty room was their enclosed universe, an area of nothing after the claustrophobic horror of the Magicians and their factory.

"If everything goes according to plan, it will come to fruition on Larry Faithful's Day of National Reconciliation."

"That's only slightly over two weeks away."

"Less actually. You've been out for five days."

That was another shock. "I have?"

"We thought it was best."

Dreisler turned and looked out of the window. Carlisle sat on the bed in his hospital smock, head bowed, watching him. What did Dreisler think he was? Every part of his image was so carefully contrived, the fashion-plate clothes, the fop's gestures and bantering manner, the black glasses, the overlong blond hair, and the leather coat over the shoulders. He was like a twentieth-century movie star. No, that was not quite right – he was more like one of the old grand-manner rock stars. Like them, he seemed to live by illusions – and the bulk of his illusions came from the darkside.

"Aren't you biting off rather a mouthful, running your own revolution?"

"It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it."

"Are you serious about this?"

Dreisler turned and faced Carlisle. "I'm deadly serious, Harry."

It only took one look at his face to convince Harry Carlisle that Dreisler meant every word he was saying.

"In actual fact, the preparations have been going on for some time. This isn't some half-assed uprising, Harry. This is the real thing, the full-scale overthrow of the theocracy." Dreisler made a scything gesture with a flattened hand. "The theocracy is not functioning, and it has to go. I like power, Harry, and power can become very limited in a bankrupt and backward country."

"Just like that?"

"The times they are a-changin'."

"You're very optimistic."

"I've done my work very well."

"What are these preparations?"

"Mainly computer viruses."

"Viruses?"

"When, as under this administration, you have your computers confused with the Almighty, you tend to become very dependent on them. You also believe everything that they tell you. Why not? The theocrat treats his computer monitor like God's own porthole." Dreisler was warming to his subject. "Over the last six months, I've had various shaped viruses loaded into the computers of all branches of the administration. Some were getgo active and have been doing deep data corruption; others are dormant, waiting for either a binary or a situational trigger. There are already whole sections of the deacons operating according to total fantasy data."

Carlisle did not think that Dreisler was insane, but he still did not know what to think of the man. He was not too sure about himself, either. Despite all his doubts, Harry Carlisle was being drawn into Dreisler's mad tale of conspiracy.

"You designed these viruses?"

Dreisler laughed and shook his head. "No, of course not. I never do anything that specific. I'm a Renaissance man."

"Machiavelli?"

"Exactly. I'm a master of the overview."

"So who wrote the viruses?"

"Most came from the Canadians; some were Japanese."

In a sentence, the conspiracy fantasy had become high treason.

"You're dealing with the Canadians?"

"Of course I'm dealing with the Canadians. We can't off the Fundamentalists without Canadian help."

"Do you know what you're doing?"

"My dear boy, on the Day of National Reconciliation, Canadian troops will cross the border at a dozen different points, immediately after I've arrested Larry Faithful."

"You've sold us out to the canuks?"

Harry had no more doubts that Dreisler was telling him the absolute truth. The most powerful deacon on the Eastern Seaboard was plotting a coup with the help of the Canadian government. The real question was why he felt the need to tell all to a mere police lieutenant. Carlisle was not sure he wanted to know the answer.

"Omelets and eggs, Harry. It can't be done without them. It's really too late for a display of irrational patriotism."

Carlisle shook his head. "I don't know about any of this. How can you be talking to the Canadians?"

"I've also been talking to the Mexicans and the British. Don't underestimate me. Policing the deacons and also what's left of the FBI/CIA has given me the chance to build what may be the biggest personal intelligence network in the world. You have to remember that I've got agents out in the field who don't have a clue who they're really working for. Once you reach that level, it's possible to talk to anyone about anything."

"What are you talking to the Mexicans about? You giving them the rest of Texas?"

"You're going to have to get over this attitude problem, Harry. I'd always believed that you were a pragmatist. For your information, the Mexicans are going to do nothing. They've agreed to hold their position until the coup has established itself."

"And you trust them?"

Dreisler shook his head. "Of course I don't trust them, but I think we have a working understanding."

Carlisle cradled his head in his hands. "I don't know about any of mis."

"Believe me, Harry. This is going to work."

Harry Carlisle needed space to digest some of Dreisler's tale. "Let me get this straight. You're telling me that you've used your position as head of the deacon IA to thoroughly contaminate the government computer system. In two Sundays from now, total chaos is going to break out, and you're going to arrest Larry Faithful, Canadian tanks are going to come steaming over the border, and we're all going to live happily ever after. Is that correct?"

"Crude, but those are the basics. There are a number of other details, but that's the general intention."

"Are you crazy?"

Dreisler smiled blandly. "Never felt better in my life."

"This just isn't possible. One man, no matter who he is, can't topple a government."

"I have associates. Look at it more as the generals' plot against Hitler."

"They ended up hanging from piano wire."

"But we're not going to. You have to remember that none of this would be possible if the present government wasn't as corrupt, inefficient, and out of touch with reality as it is."

"I don't know."

"I'm not trying to convince you, Harry. I'm just telling you what is."

"So what are these other details?"

"Over the years, we've infiltrated a large number of subversive and heretic groups. Some we've busted, but others we've used – fed them disinformation, used them for setups, kind of like the FBI and the old Communist Party. They'll be causing their own bits of trouble on the day. More confusion."

"And the Lefthand Path? Are they part of this?"

"Heavens, no. They're much more sophisticated than that. I'm very proud of the Lefthand Path. It really is my own creation. The truth is that the Lefthand Path doesn't actually exist. That's why they were so hard to catch. We had a few fanatics in a classic cell structure to take a fall if ever we needed one, but as for the rest, it was a bunch of pros from the Canadian Secret Service. Mostly expatriate Americans."

"I spent fourteen months chasing your creation."

"We watched you. That's how I discovered that you were good. By the way, you're sleeping with one."

Carlisle was confused. "Sleeping with one what?"

"A pro from the Canadian Secret Service. Cynthia Kline is a Canadian plant. She's thinks she's doing deep cover for the Lefthand Path."

Carlisle was up from the bed and on his feet. "Cynthia?"

"Yes, Cynthia. But don't worry. It's not part of the plot. She just took a liking to you."

Carlisle sat down again. "Christ."

"She's also not doing anything particularly dangerous."

"Christ."

Dreisler gave him time to digest that piece of news. He had been sleeping with a woman who was part of what he had thought of as the enemy. Now he did not know who the enemy was or, by the same token, who his friends were.

"What is this, Dreisler? Some kind of psych workout? Tear me down and then rebuild me?"

"If you want to think of it that way."

"But Cynthia…"

"Will you forget about Cynthia Kline? You're not a teenager."

Carlisle suddenly became angry. "Okay, let's look at this lunacy from another direction. How in hell do you expect to arrest Faithful? He's always surrounded by a whole platoon of bodyguards."

"Actually it's comparatively simple. You may have noticed that over the last few weeks, I've arrested a number of senior deacons pending investigation. Over the next week or so, a lot more will be brought in. It's very easy once you start. Nudge one and the rest go down like dominoes. They're all locked into their petty conspiracies. By the time he sets foot on Liberty Island, the deacon chain of command will have been broken into its individual links. Any group that I don't command directly will have been neutralized by putting an idiot in charge. God knows there's no shortage of them. When Faithful arrives for the ceremony, his primary protection will be my people. He'll have only a handful of his regular guards. There will also be military present, but they won't interfere. Their colonel and I have an understanding that centers around some grossly compromising tapes."

The whole thing was starting to sound more and more plausible. Carlisle hated to admit it, but it just might work.

"Okay, so let's say, for the sake of argument, that you've got Faithful under lock and key. What happens then? You become president-for-life or something?"

Dreisler looked genuinely shocked. "You really have misread me. I wouldn't dream of becoming president or anything like it. I don't want to be on television all the time. I'm happy to remain in the shadows, just as I am now."

"The power behind the throne."

"What else?"

"And who'll get the throne?"

"Arlen Proverb will be offered an interim presidency. He'd head a committee of national reconstruction."

So that was the deal between Dreisler and Proverb.

"I thought you wanted to off the theocracy."

"It'll be a period of transition."

"And at the end of that?"

"Who knows? It's still very much a matter of playing it by ear. We'll certainly restore parts of the Constitution. Maybe even hold limited elections."

"Don't go hog wild."

"Don't worry, I won't."

"I take it that the only reason you're baring your soul to me is that you have some role planned for me in all this," Carlisle said, wishing he were wearing something more suitable to historic conspiracy than a hospital smock.

"It is rather obvious, isn't it? "

"And I have little choice about whether I accept it or not."

"That should also be self-evident."

Carlisle sighed. "So what's the role?"

Dreisler chuckled. "I want you to walk point for me."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I estimate that there's up to a hundred men in the PD who'd follow you without question."

Carlisle shrugged. "Maybe."

"I want you to assemble a team that, on the day, can take control of the Astor Place complex. That's where we'll be bringing Faithful."

"My bosses might have something to say about that, from Parnell all the way up to the commissioner."

"I think you'll find you'll have no trouble from that direction."