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ment and Budget, the Administrator of NASA, all nine Justices of the Supreme Court. The anchorman’s voice listed the names and the positions they’d held, and the tape advanced frame by frame until the moment when the Secret Service agents were shown racing into the chamber, startling President Durling and causing some brief confusion. Heads turned, looking for danger, and perhaps the quicker-minded among them had wondered about the presence of a gunman in the galleries, but then came three frames from a wide-shot camera that showed the blurred displacement of the back wall, followed by blackness. Anchor and commentator were then back on-screen, staring down at their desktop monitors, then back up at each other, and perhaps only now the full enormity of the event finally began to hit them, as it was hitting the new President.
“President Ryan’s principal task will be to rebuild the government, if he can,” John the analyst said, after a long moment’s pause. “My God, so many good men and women . . . dead. . . .” It had also occurred to him that a few years earlier, before becoming the senior network commentator, he would have been in that chamber, along with so many of his professional friends; and for him, also, the event finally broke past the shock, and his hands started quivering below the top of the desk. An experienced pro who did not allow his voice to shake, he nonetheless could not totally control the look on his face, which sagged with sudden, awful grief, and on the screen his face went ashen under the makeup.
“God’s judgment,” Mahmoud Haji Daryaei muttered over six thousand miles away, lifting the controller and muting the sound to eliminate extraneous twaddle.
God’s judgment. That made sense, didn’t it? America. The colossus that had thwarted so many, a godless land of godless people, at the pinnacle of her power, winner of yet another contest–now, grievously harmed. How else but by God’s will could such a thing happen? And what else could it mean but God’s own judgment, and God’s own blessing? Blessing on what? he wondered. Well, perhaps that would be clear with reflection.
He’d met Ryan once before, found him spiteful and ar-
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rogant–typically American–but not now. The cameras momentarily zoomed in to show a man clutching at his coat, his head turning left and right, mouth slightly open. No, not arrogant now. Stunned, not even aware enough to be frightened. It was a look he’d seen on men’s faces before. How interesting.
TH E SAM E WORDS and the same images were flooding the world now, delivered by satellites to over a billion pairs of eyes that’d been watching the news coverage, or been alerted to the event and had changed channels from morning shows in some countries, lunch and evening shows in others. History had been made, and there was an imperative to watch.
This was particularly true of the powerful, for whom information was the raw material of power. Another man in another place looked at the electronic clock that sat next to the television on his desk and did some simple arithmetic. A horrid day was ending in America, while a morning was well begun where he sat. The window behind his desk showed a wide expanse of paving stones, a huge square, in fact, crisscrossed by people mainly traveling by bicycle, though the number of cars he saw was now substantial, having grown by a factor often over the past few years. But still bicycles were the main mode of transportation, and that wasn’t fair, was it?
He’d planned to change that, quickly and decisively in historical terms–and he was a serious student of history–only to have his carefully laid plan killed aborning by the Americans. He didn’t believe in God, never had and never would, but he did believe in Fate, and Fate was what he saw before his eyes on the phosphor screen of a television set manufactured in Japan. A fickle woman, Fate was, he told himself as he reached for” a handleless cup of green tea. Only days before she had favored the Americans with luck, and now, this…. So what was the intention of the Lady Fate? His own intentions and needs and will mattered more, the man decided. He reached for his phone, then thought better of it. It would ring soon enough, and others would ask his opinion, and he would
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have to answer with something, and so it was time to think. He sipped his tea. The heated water stung his mouth, and that was good. He would have to be alert, and the pain focused his mind inward, where important thoughts always began.
Undone or not, his plan hadn’t been a bad one. Poorly executed by his unwitting agents, largely because of the Lady Fate and her momentary largesse to America–but it had been a fine plan, he told himself yet again. He’d have another chance to prove that. Because of the Lady Fate. The thought occasioned a thin smile, and a distant look, as his mind probed the future and liked what it saw. He hoped the phone would not ring for a while, because he had to look further still, and that was best done without interference. It came to him after a moment’s further thought that the real objective of his plan had been accomplished, hadn’t it? He’d wished America to be crippled, and crippled America now was. Not in the manner he’d chosen, but crippled even so. Even better? he asked himself.
Yes.
And so, the game could go on, couldn’t it?
It was the Lady Fate, toying as she did with the ebb and flow of history. She wasn’t a friend or enemy of any man, really–or was she? The man snorted. Maybe she just had a sense of humor.
FOR ANOTHER PERSON, the emotion was anger. Days before had come the humiliation, the bitter humiliation of being told by a foreigner–nothing more than a former provincial governor!–what her sovereign nation must do. She’d been very careful, of course. Everything had been done with great skill. The government itself had not been implicated in anything more than extensive naval exercises on the open sea, which was, of course, free for the passage of all. No threatening notes had been dispatched, no official demarche issued, no position taken, and for their part the Americans hadn’t done anything more than–what was their arrogant phrase, “rattle their cage”?–and call
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for a meeting of the Security Council, at which there was nothing to be said, really, since nothing official had taken place, and her country had made no announcement. What they had done was nothing more than exercises, weren’t they? Peaceful exercises. Of course, those exercises had helped split the American capability against Japan–but she couldn’t have known ahead of time, could she? Of course not.
She had the document on her desk at this very moment: the time required to restore the fleet to full capability. But, no, she shook her head, it wouldn’t be enough. Neither she nor her country could act alone now. It would take time and friends, and plans, but her country had needs, and it was her job to see to those needs. It was not her job to accept commands from others, was it?
No.
She also drank tea, from a fine china cup, with sugar and a little milk in the English way, a product of her birth and station and education, all of which, along with patience, had brought her to this office. Of all the people around the world watching the same picture from the same satellite network, she probably understood the best what the opportunity was, how vast and appealing it had to be, all the sweeter that it had come so soon after she’d been dictated to in this very office. By a man who was now dead. It was too good to pass up, wasn’t it?
Yes.
“THIS IS SCARY, Mr. C.” Domingo Chavez rubbed his eyes–he’d been awake for more hours than his jet-lagged brain could compute–and tried to organize his thoughts. He was sprawled back on the living-room couch, shoeless feet up on the coffee table. The womenfolk in the house were off to bed, one in anticipation of work the next day, and the other with a college exam to face. The latter hadn’t figured that there might not be any school tomorrow.
“Tell me why, Ding,” John Clark commanded. The time for worrying himself about the relative skills of var-
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ious TV personalities had passed, and his young partner was, after all, pursuing his master’s degree in international relations.
Chavez spoke without opening his eyes. “I don’t think anything like this has ever happened in peacetime before. The world ain’t all that different from what it was last week, John. Last week, it was real complicated. We kinda won that little war we were in, but the world ain’t changed much, and we’re not any stronger than we were then, are we?”