14) The Nice Man Cometh

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

STATE CAPITOL ASSEMBLY BUILDING

AUSTIN

TEXAS

Mad Jack was back! The word was out amongst the staff in the building, making the September air seem even colder than normal, creating a stir from basement to penthouse; secretaries found memos to type, supervisors discovered people who weren't working, security guards made people queue for searching.

A court clerk received a call from their contact at the airport, saying that McClusky just left, a message that got passed up the line until it reached a penthouse suite, that of Congressional Aide Cheyne. He passed it back down the line of communication again until it percolated down to the lowest level.

Great, he told himself, not meaning it at all. Half an hour to prepare, not long but it will help.

In fact it didn't. Ever one for a bit of sharp practice, McClusky had in fact left the airport thirty minutes ahead of his official convoy. The first anyone in the Assembly Building knew of this was when an olive drab jeep screeched to a tyre-abrading halt in the street below. Four uniformed figures leapt out, the tallest of them leading the way up the Capitol steps two at a time. Once they reached the portico two armed guards hesitated before coming to attention. Their salutes were returned by the men in uniform. When the party had passed the two guards exchanged knowing glances with each other.

Mad Jack and his companions did not enter the building via the lobby, going over to the lifts on the left instead. Taking the middle one they rode express to the top floor by using a MagIC key to override the security brakes, thus reaching the top floor without being seen by any but a handful of people.

Cheyne was dialling through to his manager when the suite door flew violently open under the impact of a kick, done for effect since Mad Jack unlocked it first. The aide jumped so violently that the cordless fell out of his hand. And then Cheyne's worst possible scenario came true as Senator McClusky, wearing a camouflage uniform with the silver eagles and the Lone Star Guard fatigue hat he favoured, stamped into the suite.

'Hi Cheyne, surprise surprise! On your feet, quickly now boy.'

'Ahh, uh, yes sir, Senator. Mister McClusky.'

The tall Texan took his aides place and put his booted feet squarely upon the veneered table top. Cheyne winced internally; that table top cost a hundred dollars per square inch and here the Senator was, treading dirt into it and scratching it, too.

'Cheyne, Sergeant Farrell here has come to inspect the security of your premises and staff and I'd like you to escort him while he does so. Is that okay with you? 'Cause it is with me.'

The aide gulped awkwardly. There was no realistic way he could refuse and remain in employment.

Sergeant Farrell looked extremely bored, cracking his knuckles one after the other. Essentially a five-and-a-half foot square of muscle, the NCO obviously couldn't care less about inspecting the Capitol Building, it's staff or the security precautions. Nor did McClusky, but he did want Cheyne out of the way. Putting a meaty arm around Cheyne's shoulder, Farrell carefully pushed him out of the room, pulling the door shut behind them. The three remaining men visibly relaxed. One of them, with a major's insignia, produced what appeared to be a humidor and swept the room with it. The single light in the device blinked green.

'Okay, we're clean.'

McClusky expected the room to be clean and bugless since he had spent several thousand dollars on interior design, hiring an ex-Agency man to install a jamming device, when the room was refurbished a year ago.

'Well,' said McClusky. 'Shall we have a drink? Dave, you can play mother.'

Dave Cordman, the major, poured out three tumblers of whisky with a stiff jolt in each, then handed one each to McClusky and another to the third man, Peter Stone, a captain.

'Here's to a hit,' toasted McClusky, macarbrely.

'Ah, right, cheers,' replied Cordman, knocking back a big swallow. Stone drank but remained silent.

'By the way, did our weak link problem get resolved?' asked Mad Jack. Stone took another sip, grinned bleakly but stayed silent, still.

'Oh yes,' replied Cordman. 'We took a day trip to one of the open-hearth furnaces up at the Scranton Museum and threw the weak link in. Total melt down.'

A satisfied silence settled.

'Are we going to increase volume of the product we're shipping?' asked Stone.

Mad Jack shook his head.

'Nah. Expansion is how we acquired the weak link in the first place.'

Another silence fell while they sipped away, savouring the spirit.

'This is top-dollar whisky, Jack,' commented Cordman, impressed. The senator winked.

'All the way from Glen Shiel, Scotland.'

Cordman blinked. What about the embargo? Ran through his mind, and the senator picked up on his expression.

'Hey, Dave, remember my name. Blood is thicker than water, unless it's aqua vitae, better known as uisge beathe in Gaelic.'

After a while, bored of the business going on between McClusky and Cordman, to which he was emphatically not privy, Stone sat down at the room's terminal and began tapping in request codes at random. One after another the terminal rejected every word he put in. Mad Jack looked on in amusement, having finished discussing things with Cordman. The latter walked over to the busy key-tapper.

'Pete, you may as well leave it. Cheyne will have altered all the access passwords. You may have read the background file on him but blind luck will only get you so far.'

Stone cursed and punched the screen.

'How do we get in?'

Cordman momentarily wished he had one of those Total Access Computer Terminals that the Fed Commies issued to their agents. With one of those it would have been easy. Without one there was only one way he knew of at the moment, and that would be to dial in to Open Sesame, have them lock onto Cheyne's modem and speed a datastream to break the passwords. An expensive process costing upwards of a thousand dollars per second.

'What time do you have?' asked McClusky, suddenly.

'Two twenty-three. We're okay for a while yet.'

'Yeah. Oh, by the way, I hear some longhair liberal comedian is using my name in his act, saying how reactionary I am in regard to drugs. Sending me up.'

Cordman frowned. So?

'Isn't that good?'

'No it isn't!' snapped Mad Jack. 'I don't want my name associated with drugs, hard, soft or couldn't care less, full stop. See to it.'

Great, thought Cordman, careful to keep his disapproval internal. No, actually, wait a minute, we can make this look good. Use Phillips, that homo PR aide of Cheyne's, we've got a hold on him; get him to give our comedian friend an envelope of cash after informing a friendly journo. That way the longhair gets a reaming, Phillips goes down and Senator Orde is blackened by implication. Two birds, one stone. Yeah!

'Okay, sir, consider it done.'

Meanwhile, Stone had managed, by sheer luck, persistence ( and a lack of imagination on the part of Cheyne, who used his wife's name as a password), to gain access to part of Cheyne's computer records. Not all of them, just enough to make interesting reading.

'Hey, come look what I found. Phone calls, a record of phone calls Cheyne's made.'

The monitor displayed a list of the phone calls that Cheyne had been making that day, starting from early that morning. Stone proudly flourished a hand, showing what he stumbled across. When Cordman came over to have "an investigate" he spotted an outgoing call to the offices of Senator Orde, made only minutes before they had arrived.

'Senator, guess what we found. A call going out -'

'To Senator Orde's office. Yeah, I know.'

Now, how did he know that! Wondered Cordman. If he knew already he kept it under his coonskin pretty damn well.

'Hey, Dave, it was pretty friggin' obvious, you know. Orde put pressure on the selection panel and one of his pigeons got appointed, obviously to keep an eye on me and report back to Orde and his staff. It goes on more at election time, that's the only difference. And before you ask, yes we have a man in their camp. Well, now that I know for certain what Cheyne is, he's neutralised.'

Yeah, right, agreed Cordman. Someone else to take the place of Phillips, in fact. Oh, that's neat! I like it. Occasionally he found himself wondering if perhaps Senator Orde didn't have a member of staff plotting his, David M. Cordman's, demise, thoughts that even more occasionally led him to question his involvement in the cut-throat world of American politics. However, once you were in, you didn't leave. Not voluntarily, certainly.

'Two forty-five. Time to go. Button up tightly, folks.'

They went ostentatiously downstairs, making sure that their presence became known to one and all, spreading what Mad Jack called "a little healthy fear" amongst the Capitol workers. McClusky stopped once or twice to chat to people he knew.

By the time the threesome reached the lobby it was nearly three o'clock and before they stepped outside Mad Jack drew Cordman aside for a quiet word.

'Dave, just a word. I know you've organised this. That's all good and fine, but bear this in mind - if I go, my people know where your family live and ten minutes later you'll be a widower without kids. So if Orde got to you, to arrange this, they're dead. Okay! Good! Now, let's go.'

Not for the first time, Cordman considered how chilling it was, the way McClusky could switch from paranoid threats in a jovial tone to an expressionless matter of fact tone, maintaining a cheery smile the whole time.

By now the official motor cavalcade had arrived and parked in the reserved space outside the Capitol Building. In some confusion, the guards and drivers were sitting in their vehicles, leaning on them or sitting on the Capitol steps. Onec McClusky started down these steps people all leapt around busily, communing on earlink monitors, firing up engines, opening doors.

Mad Jack reached halfway down the steps before the event happened, as arranged. Between lifting up his right foot and putting it down, an invisible hammer swung from nowhere to hit him over his entire chest, driving all the breath from his lungs. The steps flew sideways, then up and sky came over, then steps again. He breath wouldn't come and he couldn't feel his chest. The edge of a step pressed into his cheek. Nothing hurt, not yet, in fact he felt numb all over. Gradually he realised there was a chorus of shouting and yelling going on all around him. Peter Stone shouted "The roof! The roof!"; a crackle of shots were taking place in the background.

It took less than a second for McClusky to realise that he had been shot, by a gunman probably situated across 15th Street, on the roof or upper floors of the District Capitol Office.

All this for the Ethics Committee, he grimly told himself, then passed out.

Father McCutcheon turned the radio off. He tried hard not to feel the hand of Divine Retribution behind the shooting of Mad Jack McClusky, knowing that the fratricidal politics of the New America Party were more likely to be responsible. Still, the biter bit, he told himself. Now he knows what it's like, to suddenly get shot for no reason.

The priest was not bitter about those of his friends and parishoners who had been disappeared, and in fact could find it in his heart to pray for the souls of those who did the disappearing act. Faith. It consoled and supported him in his struggle against the forces that had hijacked political power in America, forces that even now would be groping their way towards him. With a determined straightening of his back, he turned the power on and began to watch as the ancient Gestetner machine began its noisy duty, cranking off the sheets that he would distribute later tonight to the group leaders. They in turn would pass them out to their group members, who would paste or post or hide the leaflets where ordinary people could see them. McCutcheon was a member of the American Catholic Underground, that tentacular (not to say hydra-like) organisation that had developed in opposition to the NAP, one of the weedlike underground groups that so distracted the FBI . The priest had discovered the Gestetner wrapped in a rotting tarpaulin down in the cellars of the Catholic Mission over a year ago, and knew immediately that it had been a sign from God: spread the truth, give people the gospel news and defy the censored media. He knew people here in Seattle in the Underground and promptly joined, creating the leaflet titled, simply, "The Light". Never more than a double-sided sheet of A4, it had so aroused the ire of the FBI, the NAP, local and state police and for all he knew the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms too, that a million-dollar reward now sat on his head. Despite that, he had been at liberty for a year, puncturing the streams of lies and deceit that the government pumped out, receiving tips and information from friends and relatives, from people within the establishment who hated what it had become, from sources abroad.

Finally, the copying machine clattered to a stop and he turned it off, with an affectionate pat. He feared the noise it made when operating, knowing that it might be the clue that tipped off the police to his operation. In the fall he'd had to move it from the Mission when a curious passerby had heard the racket through an injudiciously opened window. They might not say anything to anyone, but then again … And the transfer had been the closest to disaster he'd ever come. He'd been driving to the church with Stan Mazurka, a brawny parishoner who could carry the machine single-handed, when a patrol car pulled them over on a random check. Stan had paled and muttered prayers when the patrolman swaggered over. Once the hard-eyed policeman saw the priest and the tarp over the Gestetner, he got curious and told them to uncover it. Father McCutcheon was thinking of excuses as he tugged the cloth loose and the cop saw the machine, his eyes widening a little. For a second he looked at the machine, then gestured for McCutcheon to cover it again.

'Nah. Nothing here,' he called to his partner. 'Sorry to have troubled you, Father,' he said, with a deadpan wink.

'The guy upstairs heard me,' avowed Stan.

Father McCutcheon did not debate the point.

Now, Stan was back again, in the chapel. He had ushered in a small, dark and exotic-looking woman who looked around her with a curious and unreadable expression.

Mexican? wondered Father McCutcheon, or Latino of some kind. He was puzzled at her presence here, near the Canadian border, when Mexico was so much further south. The pipeline would get her to Canada if she needed, but Mexico would have been closer for her.

'Oh, hi Father. This is -'

'Ruth Strauss,' said the woman, very quickly.

'Shalom alechem,' said McCutcheon, extending his hand. The woman blinked rapidly, apparently taken by surprise at his unquestioning acceptance of a jew in aCatholic church. 'The description "Catholic" can also apply with a small "c", Ms Strauss. A fifth of our membership is made up of Protestants. In this group we already have three jews - well, one Orthodox, one Liberal and one Marxist-Leninist who's declares himself an atheist. We are united in our resistance to a great evil and denominational differences tend to disappear as a result. Since you are here, Stan and his loyaltly committee have already vetted you. How can I help?'

Ruth Strauss blinked again.

'Ah - well - ah - this is a bit fast for me, really. I sort of expected a long settling-in period.'

Stan laughed silently. The priest glared at him and continued.

'No, sadly we don't have settling-in. Our members have to hit the ground running. Perhaps you would like to ask some questions, find your feet?'

'Oh yeah. What are you doing here?'

'Tonight I'm preparing a release of the pamphlet we send out. It's called "The Light".' The woman's eyes widened at that and she looked impressed. 'I see you know of it already! Yes, I write and print it from here.'

'Wow! I remember when I saw that the first time! That is so cool! What's in it this time?'

McCutcheon cleared his throat in embarassment, not used to the praise.

'Uh, well, this is one dedicated to two Special Agents of the FBI who decided their conscience didn't allow them to carry on in the job as before. There's Special Agent York, who objected to what he had to do on moral grounds; he sent in information to us about government eavesdropping and mail-searching. The other side of the leaflet is for Special Agent XYZ, who hasn't been caught but who gave us information on how the FBI tracks and deals with protest groups like ours, because he felt that all the internal spying the FBI did meant it neglected other duties.'

Ruth nodded to herself at this, seemingly impressed at McCutcheon's testimony.

'And now, Ms Strauss, I have to ask you what you can do for us.'

'No problem. My brother is a mail inspector in Seattle. Last month they got his boyfriend on a morals charge and Steve is hopping mad, ready to do them down in revenge. He wanted some way to get back at them and I said I'd look into it. I know there's the Democratic Labour Group, bu tI didn't know how to contact them, and the Rainbow are too violent. So - here I am.'

McCutcheon visibly perked up. A mail inspector! Things were on the up!

15) A Parting

RSFG

MUNICH

SEPTEMBER

Alex slept only a little. One of his kneecaps hurt again and as a result he lay awake next to Morika until five o'clock. She was quite a surprise package, all things considered, but what she considered him to be - that was less sure. Still, he needed to get back to Room A312 or Olukaside would tannoy him at one minute past seven. With a twinge of conscience Alex left a non-commital note for his paramour and left.

C# for twenty seconds, a tuneful and loud alarm call. Alex groped his way out of bed and got dressed on automatic pilot. This time he stuck the Zap Gun down the elasticated side of his boot. The instant the door opened a cloud of evil-smelling smoke greeted his nostrils, Olukaside's herbal mixture preceding the man himself.

'So here you are. Okay, follow me and I'll brief you.'

'Follow to where?'

'The canteen. I passed my report on to the Iceberg last night. They called me back this morning at ten to six. There appears to be a pattern of sorts emerging.'

Alex felt blank. They picked up ersatz coffee and toast with sliced sausage and sat.

'Not just about this incident, there are others, inexplicable ones that are way out of the normal profile.'

To Alex this sounded rather vague, only faintly threatening. Like thunder in the distance.

16) Hot Air

ICE07

GEOSTATIONARY PLOT

EASTERN MEDITERANNEAN

SEPTEMBER

Officially members aboard ICE07 were on permanent duty and had no leisure time. Of course, human nature being what it is, this nonsense got treated with the derision it deserved and members held a certain portion of their day as time off, remaining nominally on-call.

Now, on the observation deck, an informal discussion took place between UNION assignees around a private viewing booth with the screen left on but the sound reduced in volume. Bibor was there, along with Rossi, Gray and others.

'There is a pattern here, a network -' began Bibor.

'Bull!' snorted Gray. 'That's a nonsense, how could there be!'

'No, I agree with Bibor. There is a connection,' stated Rossi.

'Seriously?'

'Look. The Threat Assessment Package has sorted all this out. There is a connection between those bomb attacks at Red Rock, the American military engineers going berserk, Atom City being attacked.'

'Must be quite a persuasive connection to join the dots on all three of those.'

'Yes. It's our ex-Number Two, Bob Chernovsky. Seen at all three sites.'

'Perhaps. We can't trust the Americans to tell the truth about anything, you know.'

'They didn't report anything, we eavesdropped on them, got the information via FIDO. They don't know that we know that they know.'

'Alright, so Chernovsky is involved. Where does that leave us?'

'So there's the pattern.'

'I still think there's a network.'

'No, can't see it. What pattern is there? No-one gains from an attack on Krasniy Kameniev, no-one at all.'

'Perhaps the Russians would gain from an attack on Atom City.'

'Yeah, and Chernovsky's Russian. Just about proves it, eh? It's a plot by him to take over the whole world.'

'Oh come on! Chernovsky was in UNION before the wheel got invented. How the hell do we know he's gone over -'

'How likely is it?'

'There's no alternative, he must be responsible.'

While his subordinates argued amongst each other to no conclusion, Weiss communed with more high-powered FedCon members. Not in person, only by broadcast. As he saw it, merely one of the interminable meetings he needed to attend to; Bibor ought to be assuming a portion of them but lacked the experience needed, an irksome reminder about the loss of Chernovsky.

Which, by coincidence, happened to be the topic of discussion at the moment.

'How serious is this man's defection?' asked one of the Security Review Commission members. 'I mean, he can be replaced, can't he?'

'Yes. That isn't the crux of the matter. Chernovsky was my Number Two for five years and an assignee for three years before that an inductee before that. In short, he knows UNION inside-out from the bottom upwards. As a result of his presumed defection, capture or interrogation we have been forced to change codes, ciphers and various software packages dealing with security. A long and slow process, I warn you.'

Costly, too, Weiss might have added. Contingency plans for such an eventuality had been laid down years ago but their implementation to date was rather stumbling.

'Can we say, then, that currently measures are being undertaken to resolve the assumed defection of an important UNION member?'

Oh yes, better get the story right before the media got hold of it. A display screen lit up with a unanimous collection of green lights via broadcast; there was a clear consensus between the scattered Committee members. They moved on to the next item on their tele-agenda: Red Rock and Various Security Aspects Associated With It. Weiss reported that a UNION agent had been despatched on the Red Rocket when the extent of the disaster became obvious, hoping to impress his overseers with this, since the launch schedule for Krasniy Rackyeta had been brought forward by a month and discomfited a great many people; tourists, passengers, crew and System Command traffic controllers. With a high-cost, long-burn, rapid transit to Mars there would be an extra billion marks on the balance sheet, but Weiss knew from past experience that when Mars was concerned expense meant little. All nations working in harmony, that kind of back-slapping self-congratulatory stuff, where nobody wanted to play the villain and cut the budget.

As he mentioned, security precluded any transmission from their agent on Mars unless exceptional circumstances warranted it; there were still the American bases on the Moon to consider, their Big Ear satellites and monitoring stations, all of which would eagerly eavesdrop on any Earthbound transmission.

17) Our Man On Mars

RED ROCK GEOSTATIONARY PLOT

MARS

EARTH RELATIVE SEPTEMBER

The Red Rocket wasn't capable of travel in an atmosphere and it couldn't cope with gravity wells, either. This meant that it needed to stand well off in orbit whilst passengers and crew were ferried up from or down to it's planet of call. Despite the name, the vessel that travelled between Mars, the Moon and Earth looked nothing like the conventional streamlined missile so beloved of old. The forward section was a torus with two cross-corridors running along two diameters at right angles to each other; and the juncture of these was a cylindrical body. From the rear of the torus ran another length of corridor, terminating in the power plant, a spherical unit. Passengers and cargo travelled in the torus, crew in the cylinder.

From the departing, Mars-bound shuttle craft, Anderson Lovell could see the interplanetary spaceship in all its shabby grandeur, large enough to be impressive, old enough to be worn, important enough to have a "paint-job" annually. It cost too much to simply be abandoned and the intricate finances to replace it were not yet agreed.

Lovell bore the official title of an MJO investigative officer on assignment to Red Rock. In reality he was a UNION agent-nominee out to do a thorough research job into the sabotage attempts. His brief was to delve into the background, organisation, systems and personalities of the Martian base, in addition to the explosive sabotage.

'Attention please, attention please,' said a hidden speaker, which then repeated the phrase in seven languages, of which Lovell recognised only French and German.

'We are about to enter the Martian atmosphere. For your safety please lock you retaining stanchion in place. Those of you with window seats -' all six passengers in fact '- may look down as we begin our descent. You will see the stunning Martian landscape, marvel at exotic hues and colours and thrill to the many marvellous sights.'

Lovell began to wonder at the attitude of the pilot, coming over sarcastic like that. He peered out of his window, looking at the light side of the demarcator, as the surface expanded away in all directions, Red Rock becoming faintly visible. Clusters of domes, stellate interconnecting walkways, submerged corridors. A large block of lights blinking rhythmically with the phi effect showed where shuttles landed. Near to that, too near in the opinion of Lovell, were the swelling tops of liquid fuel tanks. As they dropped lower still, more details became visible, like the lights shining from semi-polarised windows.

All anti-climactic. Millions of miles from Earth with just this to travel to. Even if most of Red Rock was buried underground there seemed precious little to show for the trillions invested there. So much of gross national product world-wide had been poured into Red Rock that it was said war had been rendered impossible for decades afterwards, due to fiscal depletion.

The shuttle grounded with a thump.

'Okay, here we are. Welcome to Mars. Enjoy your stay because once we leave, that's it, you're stuck here.'

The speaker sounded bored. Understandable really, after their tedious journey across the depths of interstellar space, a process what had no romance to it so far as Lovell could see. Everything aboard the ship was carried out by computer with the crew acting in a supervisory role, intervening only rarely when things went wrong. The entire passage was a far cry from the wonderful special effects "hyperspace" trips taken by space travellers in films.

Releasing his retaining stanchion, Lovell straightened up, hearing his knees crack loudly. A stewardess, face carefully rendered symmetrical by surgery, stalked down the aisle, smiling broadly at each passenger. She ferried them all to the egress port and outside.

Lovell took his first step onto the soil of an alien world and found it hard and unyielding - because he stood on plastic flooring rather than Martian ground. The flooring was past of a corridor, very brightly lit and glaring white. Another anticlimax for Lovell, who discovered that a corridor on Mars looked much like a corridor anywhere else.

A dark-skinned man, possibly Indochinese, waited at the entry gate for arrivals from Earth in order to greet them personally. He shook hands with them all while they crossed the light barrier and underwent sterilisation. It may have been the Antiguan's imagination, but he thought that the man shook his hand with unusual force.

The man, Bhatacharjee by name and Indian by origin, explained that one of the hardest things to come to terms with about Mars was the sheer ordinariness of the indoors environment. As Lovell had already experienced, an enclosed room felt and looked like an enclosed room anywhere with only the perceived change in body weight to remind one of just where you were - and the mind and body soon adjusted to the difference in weight.