Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

CHAPTER 44

The city at night. It took your breath away.

Wilson drank it all in as he headed into town. The hills tumbling down to the water. The contours of land, made visible by the city’s lights, ending at the harbor’s inky edge. It was gorgeous, and it just got better the closer you came. A galaxy of skyscrapers glittered against a backdrop of stars, the Golden Gate ablaze with the lights of cars.

The natural setting was spectacular, but it was technology that made the city beautiful at night. Wilson smiled at the irony. The glittering world in front of him was a direct descendant of the first illuminated metropolis: the White City of the Chicago World’s Fair, which Tesla’s inventions had helped to light.

Ironically, Wilson thought, it was Tesla’s technology, improved upon by himself and manifest in the transmitter atop the lookout tower in Nevada, that would put out the lights forever. America was about to return to more natural, diurnal rhythms.

How long, he wondered, until the cars disintegrated? Decades, he guessed, even in the Bay Area’s moist air. Some of the metal might be scavenged. The rest would oxidate. But the plastic? The rubber? It would be there for centuries, an eyesore and a reminder, except in the country’s more fecund climates, where it would disappear in the midst of encroaching forests.

And the bridges? The bridges would remain until an earthquake pulled them down.

Driving into the city, he felt the lure of it: the normal life. He and Irina could be happy here. He could sell the ranch and buy a house. Get a job, or start a business. Felon or not, a good engineer was a rare commodity. He could introduce Irina to the silver-dollar pancakes at Sears, and watch her dimpled smile as she enjoyed the role reversal of being waited on. They could go to Chinatown and Golden Gate Park. Their kids would play t-ball and soccer. He’d buy her a minivan, and head north along the coast to the Russian River, where people from her part of the world settled a century ago, trapping and fishing.

Right, Wilson thought. We’ll do that. And then we’ll hold hands and sing “We Are the World.”

He pulled up in front of the Nikko, and let the valet park the Escalade. The transmitter he’d used in Culpeper was locked down under the bed’s cover. Then he checked in, went to his room, and cleaned up.

He grabbed a bottle of water from the minibar, dropped into a comfortable chair, and removed the tiny photograph of Irina from his wallet. He looked at it for a long time. There was something almost inscrutable about her expression, a mixture of sadness and hope… and something else. He couldn’t quite figure it out, but that was okay, too. She’d be flying into Vegas in a few days, and after that, he’d have a lifetime to learn her secrets.

It was raining the next morning. Brake lights bled onto the slick black pavement. The Escalade’s wheels hissed as it rolled along a network of one-way streets, arriving, just a few minutes later, at the courthouse.

The building didn’t open until nine, but he wanted to get to it early, so he could scope out the parking. He needed exact GPS coordinates for both the spot where he’d be parked and the courtroom he was targeting. Culpeper had been a more amorphous target, and therefore comparatively easy.

The awkward part was the need to expose and elevate the weapon. It didn’t look like much, it didn’t even look like a weapon, but it looked strange – there was no question about that. And while he needed clean sight lines, he also needed to park in a spot where no one was likely to notice the truck for the few minutes it would take to do what he had to do.

In the end, any number of places might have been suitable, but the decision as to which was best was a no-brainer. He smiled as he pressed the button and retrieved the ticket for the Turk Street garage. It was so early that only the first two levels were occupied – with a sprinkling of cars on the third. After that, nothing.

Wilson drove straight to the roof. Rain pounded the windshield as he emerged into the open air. It was clear at a glance that at eight a.m. on a weekday, level five was likely to be empty.

After checking the locations of surveillance cameras, he backed into slot 952.

Standing at the truck’s rear, Wilson looked out directly at the courthouse. The CCTV cameras would be able to see the bed of the truck, this was true, but one camera’s visual field would be partially impeded by a post and the other would be somewhat obscured by the truck’s cab.

He considered it. He could spray-paint the lenses. Or he could go with the probabilities. There were four cameras on each level. That made twenty cameras in all. There was probably a bank of monitors somewhere on-site. But most of the time, absent a disturbance, no one would be looking at the feed from the surveillance cameras. The footage was primarily for later use, if there was a theft or some other crime.

What were the odds, Wilson wondered, that a security guard would be paying attention to the camera covering slot 952 during the five minutes Wilson needed to deploy the weapon? And what, in any case, would the guard see? Surveying equipment, or something like it, in the back of a Cadillac Escalade.

He took the elevator to street level and crossed to the Philip Burton Federal Courthouse. It was a huge structure. He’d read that there were eighty assistant U.S. attorneys, six federal magistrates, and thirteen district judges walking its halls. Fed Central, in other words.

One of the district judges was former U.S. Attorney Joe Sozio, who had brought the solicitation of murder charge against Wilson. Sozio had been appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush in 2003. He was currently presiding over a case in Courtroom 3.

Wilson signed in, and showed his ID. He placed his jacket and hat on the conveyor belt, and put his wristwatch and change in a plastic bin. The guard waved him through.

The case in Courtroom 3 seemed to involve a Central American gang. Wilson scanned the crowd. The benches closest to the defense side of the courtroom were packed with Salvadorans. At least, he thought they were Salvadorans. Their skin was darker than Wilson’s own, and they had the distinctive features of the region. Wilson noticed that the older observers – parents, aunts, and uncles, he supposed – were modestly but respectably dressed, while the younger males wore the big shirts and droopy pants of gangbangers.

Like Wilson, they were Indians or, what was more likely, mestizos – a mixture of Indian and European blood.

“All rise.”

Wilson got to his feet with the others while the bailiff called the court to order. He took a GPS reading from his wristwatch, and noted it on a pad. It was nine thirty-two.

Wearing his robes, Judge Sozio entered the room with the air of a celebrity, striding to the thronelike chair on which he sat in judgment on mere mortals. He was the patriarch, and it was only when he had taken his seat that the rest of them were allowed to do the same.

Wilson watched him with a cold eye. His hair had thinned and gone to gray, and his chin was beginning to sag. But, otherwise, he looked much the same. His light brown eyes still had the predatory gaze of a raptor. For a moment, they flicked Wilson’s way, and Wilson felt his heart do a little dance in his chest. But there was no gleam of recognition in Sozio’s eyes.

One of the Salvadoran kids was sworn in. “I do,” he said in a high-pitched whispery voice, following the bailiff’s bored recitation.

The prosecutor, a Latina in a pale blue suit, got to her feet at Sozio’s prompt and swerved toward the kid like a cruising shark.

Wilson didn’t want to call attention to himself. He waited until the court went into recess, and returned to his hotel.

There, he typed the GPS coordinates that he’d taken into his ThinkPad. Then he set about logging in the equations that defined the beam.

This was one of the amazing things about the weapon, something Wilson had learned from a marginal note of Tesla’s. The beam was versatile, capable of emitting paired waves from any part of the electromagnetic spectrum. In one manifestation, it caused total destruction of the target mass – Tunguska, in other words. But with a relatively simple focal adjustment, he could unleash an electromagnetic pulse like the one over Culpeper.

For Sozio, however, Wilson had something else in mind. With a tweak, he could irradiate the courthouse with energy from a different part of the spectrum, one that had much longer wavelengths and lower frequencies than gamma rays. Microwaves, in other words.

He was a kid when microwave ovens first became popular. People hadn’t understood how they worked. Not that they understood them now, but at least they knew enough not to put poodles in them to dry after a shampoo. Most people also realized that positioning was critical in a microwaved environment. For even cooking, you had to rotate the dish, or place it on a revolving turntable. Volume was important, too. The more you had in the oven, the longer it would take to cook. And metal was out: Even little kids knew that it would blacken, pop, and burn if you microwaved it.

Like poodles, people are mostly water. Put water in a microwave, and it will boil.

Or at least some of it will. Because of the building’s structural complexity and the nature of microwaves, the damage to people in the courthouse would not be uniform. Some would get a sunburn, probably a bad one. But others would be hit harder. They’d see their skin split open like the casing of a steamed hot dog. It would be terrible. And it would be even more dramatic in Courtroom 3, where everyone, but most especially his Honor, Judge Sozio, would explode like so many balloons.

He got up early the next morning and exercised for an hour in the Nikko’s gym. After he showered, he put on the hotel robe. Out of habit, he picked up the sewing kit and dropped it into his suitcase. In the old days, he used to save that sort of thing for Mandy. Her eyes had been starting to go and she loved the little plastic containers: the prethreaded needles lined up in an array of colors.

Mandy. She had been the hardest one to turn his back on, harder than Sharon, even. A couple of times he’d been tempted to drive out to the trailer and see her. He could imagine her, sitting outside in the white Adirondack chair he’d given her on her birthday. Iced tea perched on the armrest. A book in hand.

Forget it, he told himself, and called down to the front desk for his car. Then dressed and packed his bag, left a tip for the maid and headed out.

It was one of those quintessential California days, sparkling and clear, the air rinsed clean by yesterday’s rain. He drove to the garage on Turk Street and made his way to the roof.

His was the only vehicle there. He backed into the chosen slot and with the engine running, unsnapped the cover, pulled aside the Styrofoam that held the weapon in place, and attached it to the laptop. Then he waited for the barrel to telescope into position. When the green diode began to blink at its base, he took a deep breath, and flipped the toggle switch.

That was that.

Thirty seconds later, he toggled the switch a second time. The light blinked off, and the barrel telescoped into itself. He reset the Styrofoam blocks, buttoned the cover over the Escalade’s little bed, and got back in the truck. Then he wound his way down to the ground floor of the garage, forcing himself to drive slowly so his tires wouldn’t squeal on the floor.

This was the one drawback to parking on the roof. It took a while to get down and, when he did, he was hyperventilating. There were two cars in front of him, waiting to pay, and they took their time about it. When he finally pulled out of the garage into the street, people were staggering out of the federal building in droves, hysterical and screaming. Some fell to the ground and rolled. Others stutter-stepped, first one way, then the other.

Their flight was pointless and reflexive, like insects sprayed with poison. There was no escaping what had happened to their bodies, but escape they must, so flee they did. It was useless, of course. And these were the survivors! (At least, for now.) The scene inside the courthouse would be unimaginable.

Wilson turned toward the corner, only to find himself at a red light. He was desperate to get away. In a minute or so, the area would be in gridlock as emergency vehicles rushed to the scene and passersby panicked at what they were seeing. Wilson watched in horror as a sightless woman with suppurating skin ran blindly into the Escalade, then reeled away in the other direction, her mouth open in a silent scream.

His own vision was beginning to fray at the edges. It was just a flicker at the side of his eye, but he knew where it was going. The pattern was intricate and beautiful, scalloped and iridescent. In a couple of minutes, he’d be half-blind.

He heard sirens now, wailing in and out of harmony with the quavering cries of those who’d fled the courthouse. Already, traffic was grinding to a standstill as people got out to help, slowed to gawk, or succumbed to fender benders. On impulse, Wilson, turned the Escalade into the entrance to an underground parking lot that served the Civic Center.

Grabbing a ticket, he spiraled down to the third floor, pulled into a space, and sat, waiting for his sight to come back. It didn’t seem like a good idea to sit in the truck so close to the scene. Even in the garage, under tons of concrete, he could hear the sirens, a layered wailing effect that sounded like women ululating.

He stayed in the Escalade for what seemed like a long time, although he couldn’t be sure of the duration. Neither his watch nor the digital numbers on the dashboard were legible to him. A waterfall of light danced in front of him.

Taking out his wallet, he fumbled for the picture of Irina that he carried. Holding it in the palm of his hand, he tried to focus on it.

At first, he couldn’t be sure if he was looking at the picture, or at its back. But then, her face began to appear, almost like a simulacrum. Finally, it snapped into focus. The almond-shaped eyes, her bright smile.

When he looked at his watch, he almost laughed. He’d been disabled for less than ten minutes. Even so, he’d hoped to be on his way to the airport by now, the idea being to abandon the Escalade in a satellite lot and rent something else for the drive to Vegas.

That was out of the question now. Traffic would be frozen for hours around the courthouse and Civic Center. The best thing to do, he decided, was to leave the Escalade right where it was. Walk to the BART station, and get to the airport that way.

On foot, there was nothing to incriminate him. His laptop looked ordinary enough, and his suitcase could stay where it was, locked in the truck.

Plan B, then, Wilson thought, and walked quickly to the elevator.

Once outside, he kept going, head down, walking quickly. It was hell on a beautiful day. At the BART station, a red-haired woman was babbling about “a freak fire at the courthouse – they say a boiler blew, and lots of people were burned.”

A black man in a Zegna suit and Hermès tie nodded knowingly: “Superheated air.”

At the airport, people were clustered around television monitors, shaking their heads incredulously. On-screen, a platinum blonde reporter stood in front of the Civic Center, commenting on the scene in a smaller screen that showed people in spacesuits, or what looked like space suits, toddling in and out of the courthouse. The reporter was doing her best to keep her composure, but she was breathless and obviously rattled by what she’d seen. “No one – I can’t find anyone – with any idea about who, or what, is responsible for this.”