Whatever else, she needed to know she had a mother and father who both loved her and wanted her to be happy, even if they couldn’t be happy with each other.
Certainly this wasn’t some thing he had ever foreseen for himself when he’d been courting Megan, when they’d been young, in love, with the world by the tail, so full of themselves they could never envision failing at anything, much less their marriage. Ah, the arrogance of youth, when you knew everything, and didn’t care who knew you knew everything, since you were willing to tell them all about it at great length if they blinked at you.
Boy, that had been a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…. Maybe he could get some sleep. Just lean over against that cool plastic window with one of the little puffy pillows, and turn it all off.
There was an idea that had much appeal.
Thursday, December 23rd, 5:15 P.m.
Washington, D.c.
The car was small, black, and looked like an old Fiat The driver heard the siren behind him and pulled over, next to a row of small shops that appeared to be closed. There was a shoe store with a Nike swoosh on the glass, and an electronics store with small television sets in the window. The words on the storefronts looked to be German or Austrian, maybe Croat.
The Fiat’s door opened and a smallish man in a long, dark coat stepped out of the car. He had his hands up next to his shoulders, to show he was unarmed.
The sun was bright, but the street seemed deserted save for him.
A pair of policemen approached the Fiat, pistols drawn. The uniforms they wore had that Middle European look, odd shaped billed caps with checkering on the front, leather jackets over dark blue shirts and ties, and dark blue trousers with a yellow seam-stripe on the outside of the legs. One of the cops moved to stand in front of the small man in the long coat; the other cop checked out the car.
The first cop gestured with the gun and said some thing. The small man turned around and put his hands on top of the Fiat, and the cop patted him down. No weapons.
The second cop talked into a small comm, but kept his pistol pointed in the Fiat driver’s direction. Second cop listened to the comm for a moment. He nodded at the first cop, and said some thing.
The small man leaning against the car shoved away from it, swung his elbow up, hitting the cop behind him in the face, and knocking him down.
The small man ran. The second cop darted around the front of the Fiat, raised his pistol, and fired–four, five, six times. The gun belched orange fire and white smoke, and the empty shells showered the car. The brass hulls glinted in the bright sunshine like gold coins as they bounced and dropped to the sidewalk.
The small running man fell, face-down on the street. He moved his arms and legs, as if spastically trying to swim on the concrete.
The cop who had been elbowed in the nose recovered. He moved to where the small man lay on the street. He pointed his pistol at the back of the downed man’s head. He fired.
The little man spasmed one more time, then went limp.
Thomas Hughes blew out a big sigh, then froze the recording’s image. The two cops stood over the dead man and there was no doubt he was dead, a bullet to the back of the head from three feet away sure as hell did that.
Man. They just executed that poor sucker. And all of it caught on the surveillance cam mounted on the dashboard of the police car.
Hughes leaned back in his chair and looked at the frozen holoprojection.
He felt a flash of regret, but he buried it. The man was a spy, he had known there were risks.
He’d had to know what might happen to him if he got caught.
Of course, he probably hadn’t thought his name would be stolen from a top-secret list nobody was supposed to have access to and posted to the net so anybody who bothered to look would know who he was.
Hughes had gotten the recording from one of his spies actually one working for Platt. And it was brutal to watch, a man getting murdered like that. It turned your stomach, made you queasy.
But there it was. You couldn’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. It was necessary. What were a few spies, easily replaced, compared to the long-range goals Hughes had in mind? Not much, not really. The end in this case surely justified the means. People died every day. A handful more wouldn’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things.
The new Quayle addition to the Senate office building where White had his offices was nearly empty. Not a lot of people were working at this hour on the day before Christmas Eve. Hughes assumed that the other Senate office buildings the Russell, the Dirkson, the Hart were also mostly deserted, save for security and cleaning personnel, with maybe a few young staff members trying to make points while everybody else was off for the holidays. Not much official work got done from early December on into the new year, but a lot of groundwork did get laid.
White had once had offices in the Hart Building, back when they’d still had that ugly modern-art sculpture of cut-out metal, Mountains and Clouds or some such, in the atrium.
The staff on the upper floors had spent a lot of time sailing paper airplanes down to land on top of the sculpture. They’d had contests to see who could get the most to hit and stay.
He sighed again. The stakes were high, and the cards had to be played correctly or the game would be lost. It was a pity about this agent, and about the others who would be imprisoned or maybe killed, but there was no way around it. There was a lot of inertia to overcome to get some thing as big as he had in mind to move–a lot. This spy was the first, but he wouldn’t be the last who had to die for Hughes’s plan to go forward. It was too bad, but that was how it was. In this world, you could be a hunter or the hunted, and sheep were prey for wolves, plain and simple. It was the first law of the jungle-the strong survive at the expense of the weak.
And Thomas Hughes was a survivor.
He saved the recording into a file for White to look at later, then started to wave the computer off.
He’d done enough here for the day.
Time to go home, order in some takeout, and have a glass of wine and a nice hot bath. Maybe he’d lift a glass to the poor operatives who had to suffer for his scheme. Why not? It wouldn’t cost him anything.
His comm cheeped. It was the secret number, rerouted through some thing like sixteen satellite bounces so it couldn’t be traced to him.
He checked the scrambler to be sure it was on, even though it was automatic on this number, and clicked on the voxaltering circuit, picking Old Lady for the latter. Whoever was on the other end would hear what sounded like a ninety-year old woman talking.
“Hello?” he said.
There was silence for a moment.
“Who’s there?” Hughes said.
“I have some information concerning certain… shipments.” Hughes knew who it was. A mid-level manager at the National Security Agency, a man with top secret clearance, but a man who had a secret gambling problem and was deep in the hole to his bookies. His voice was altered too.
Hughes had been waiting for the man to come up with some thing for him.
The gambler didn’t know who he was speaking to.
“Go on.” “It concerns some volatile… minerals.” “I’m still listening.” “I need fifty thousand.” Hughes could almost hear the man sweating.
“How much of the… volatile substance are we talking about?” “Nineteen pounds. In four packages. On the same day.” Hughes considered that in amazement for a moment.
Nineteen pounds of weapons-grade plutonium was being moved at the same time? Certainly not by the same agency inside the U.s.” even broken into that many sub-critical-mass chunks.
The NRC and NSA would have kittens if somebody did some thing that stupid. But he had to check.
“This is domestic movement?” “Of course not. Two are, two are foreign.
Six pounds, seven pounds, four, and two.” “When?” “In two days. You want the particulars or not?” “Fifty thousand, you said.” “Yes. In cash. Nothing bigger than a hundred.” “All right. I’ll have somebody meet you at the place, tonight, nine p.m. Bring the information.” Hughes broke the connection. He hadn’t planned to escalate things quite this much, this fast, but when some thing like this fell into your lap, you grabbed it and ran with it.