Armageddon Crazy

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.