The Wall, page 16
“Would it matter? If I was dead?”
“Strangely, yes. God knows why. The last thing I need in my life is a crazy woman.”
She scowled at him. “Thanks. Except I’m not in your life. I drugged you to get the access. Now we’re finished. You can just walk away.”
He shook his head. “As I said—crazy. If you do anything, you’ll be killed or captured. There will be an investigation. They’ll find out you used my access, and there’s the end of my brand-new start. My future. Whether I like this or not, I’m in it up to my neck.”
“You could still turn me in.”
“Too late for that. Besides, you’re forgetting that there’s more at stake than your predictions. What’s on this file of Stella’s? Why give it to me?”
She lifted her chin. “Desperation, probably.”
“Thanks,” he said dryly. “We have to get it before anyone else does. That means working together.” Suddenly he felt like the room was pressing in on him. The windowless place reminded him too much of the interrogation room where they had questioned him after Aaron had disappeared. He’d told them he hadn’t known anything. They’d tortured him anyway. Broken him down, stripped away everything he believed in. He’d thought he’d built himself up again, but really, he hadn’t. He was just a whole mass of contradictions, doubts, and fears, loosely cobbled together.
And at the bottom, maybe hope that there could still be a better world, a free world, out there somewhere.
But right now, he just needed to get out of there.
“Come on. Let’s go for a walk. I need to get my head straight, and then you can bring me back here and prove to me that you’ve made a machine that can predict the future.”
She appeared about to argue, but she must have seen something in his face, because she leaned across, switched off the systems, and stood up. “I’m hungry. I suppose it’s weird in the middle of all this—feeling hungry, I mean. As if my appetite has no right to exist when the world is falling apart around me.”
He exhaled, still in the grip of his need to get out, feeling as though the weight of the building might collapse on them at any moment. He took her arm and ushered her out of the office and into the corridor, then up the stairwell that opened into the reception area.
They passed through security and then out onto the street. He gulped in the air.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. I can just get a little claustrophobic underground.”
“Is that from when you were in the army?”
For a moment, he thought about just saying yes and leaving the subject, but in the end, he wanted there to be truth between them. “No. I was interrogated ten years ago, after Aaron disappeared. They wanted to find out if I knew anything.”
“They tortured you?”
“It wasn’t pleasant.”
“Your father…? Do you think that’s why he killed himself?”
She was always so direct. Didn’t shy away from asking questions most people would avoid. “Maybe. Or perhaps he couldn’t take the shame. His position meant everything to him.”
“Yes. I keep thinking about my family. What will happen to them—what’s left of them—if I go through with this.”
“Don’t. In fact, for the next hour don’t think about anything. A walk, then some breakfast. Then we’ll…Christ knows. Decide what to do next, I suppose.”
The sun shone, the sky was cloudless, the city around them went on, people working, children going to school. They strolled along the quiet streets in silence, walking close together. After a few minutes, he slipped his hand into hers, almost as if they were lovers. He told himself he was just keeping a close watch on her, but the truth was that touching her made him feel grounded. Which was odd, because she was crazy and deluded and plotting treason. She believed she had made a machine that could think and tell the future.
They found a café with tables on the street. Reluctantly he released her hand and they sat down, ordered coffee and bagels with cream cheese. It all seemed so normal. He realized he was starving and ate the first lot without speaking, then called over the waiter and ordered seconds. Finally, they both sat back replete, sipping their coffee in the sun.
“America’s not such a bad place, is it?” She waved her hand around the street, the café.
“How do we know? There’s no way of telling what’s going on beyond our own little bit of the country. The news feeds are all controlled by the administration. We only know what they tell us.”
“Like aliens being deported back to their own country.” She rested her chin on her hand and watched the passers-by. “The day of the president’s birthday—that was when this all began—I saw a family being taken away at the checkpoint. They looked so scared. I always believed they were just deported, flown to wherever they do belong and released. Not so bad.”
He’d once believed that as well.
“I asked Auspex later what would happen to them. He predicted they were dead already or being kept for spare parts. When did that happen? When did the American people agree to do that?”
“The American people haven’t had a say in much of anything since Martial Law came into force.”
She emptied her mug, placed it on the cheery checked tablecloth. “One of my jobs is to monitor for alerts and pass them on to the Secret Service. I’ve been deleting the code greens—the alien activity—ever since Auspex told me what the likely result would be. Someone is probably going to notice any day now. So I’m likely finished anyway.” She gave a weak smile. “Maybe I should run away and join the rebels. Except what’s the point if we’re all going to blow up?”
“Not much point at all.”
“This whole thing has gotten me thinking. We’ve been living our lives wearing blinkers. Kidding ourselves that what we don’t see isn’t happening. That we aren’t murdering innocent people just because they don’t have the right paperwork. I hate it.” Her voice was suddenly fierce. He glanced around, but there was no one listening.
“And you know what?” she continued. “Once I’d admitted to myself that I hate it, it was like a wall was knocked down in my mind. I realized that I hate this country and the way we live. I hate being told what I can and can’t do. I hate that we have no freedom. That I can’t go to the goddamn moon if I want to.”
“You think you could build a spaceship?”
“Auspex says there’s a 76 percent chance I could.”
He wished she hadn’t mentioned Auspex. “As long as the world doesn’t implode first.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Yes.”
“I suppose it comes down to what most people want. To be safe or to be free?”
“What do you want?”
He thought for a moment. Not about his answer, but about how much of himself he wanted to reveal to this woman. While he still didn’t entirely trust her, in the end, he went with the truth. “For me, it’s not really a choice anymore. I know that safety is an illusion. I grew up believing that I had a place in the world, that I was part of something bigger than me. And just like that it was gone, and I was on my own. Worse than on my own, because I knew that anyone I cared for could be gone just as easily as my brother and my father.”
She leaned toward him, her expression earnest, and placed her hand over his. He looked at it for a moment.
“So you decided not to care.”
“It wasn’t that difficult.” Though that wasn’t entirely true. In the army, he’d learned about camaraderie. Looking out for each other.
“Maybe you can only be free if you have nothing and no one to care about,” she said. “It’s a sort of freedom anyway. Though not like going to the moon.” She sighed. “I’d choose freedom.”
“Just as well, because you’ve pretty much fucked up any chance you have at safety.”
She grinned, though it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Yeah. Tell me about the Wall.”
“What about it?”
“What’s it like? What’s on the outside? Did you get to meet any non-Americans? What were they like?”
“As most of them tended to be shooting at me, we never really got to know each other. But yes, I went over the other side. It was…bleak. The area has been mined for miles in every direction.”
“Who is it, though? Who are we fighting? What do they want?”
He didn’t know anymore. “I don’t know.”
“I had a dream the night I saw the family taken away at the checkpoint. They threw them out of this big black gate, and they choked on noxious gases.”
“They don’t send aliens out through the Wall.”
“No. They keep them here. At least their body parts, anyway.” Another sigh. “I suppose we should go back.”
“And you can tell me the future.”
They’d walked a long way around but headed back to her office by the most direct route. About halfway there, they hit a checkpoint. The Secret Service agent was redirecting people. Gideon pulled out his ID and flashed it. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“A rally at the bottom of K Street, sir. Possible rebel activity. A code two has been called. We’ve been told not to let any civilians through.”
The man didn’t comment as Gideon gestured to Kate to pass. This was the pro-democracy rally. They were usually peaceful. They just wanted a return to democracy, which everyone had been promised anyway.
As they approached the crossroads at 14th and K, the sound of running feet came from up ahead. Instinct kicked in, and Gideon stopped Kate with a hand on her arm. They were on a broad street lined with shops and offices. Just as they turned the corner, he heard the familiar hiss of a rocket flying through the air, and they came face to face with a mass of running people.
Were they under attack?
The rocket screeched over their heads, crashing into the street about a hundred feet from where they stood, just in front of the wave of people. It exploded in a cloud of gas, filling the air with black fumes like something out of a nightmare.
Another exploded, and another, until there was an almost solid wall of smoke. The people were stumbling now, coughing and choking, crashing to their knees.
Gideon dragged Kate back into a doorway as running feet sounded behind them. Wrapping his arms around her, he turned her so she was pressed against the wall between him and anything that was coming. Reaching behind her, he tried the door. It was locked. They were going nowhere.
D.C. had become a war zone and, for now, they were stuck in the middle of it.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” George Washington
Kate swallowed. She was plastered against Gideon, although if she raised her head she could see over his shoulder to where the world had changed into a swirling mass of smoke and chaos.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, the cries of panic sounding as though from a distance rather than only feet away. The blue sky had turned dark.
She tore her gaze from the mass of people to the other direction and went still. She wasn’t sure what to expect. Rebels? Instead she saw a line of Secret Service officers, weapons drawn, sinister behind their gas masks.
She gripped Gideon closer, knew he was aware of them, his body tense against hers. “Stay still,” he murmured.
She didn’t think she could have moved even if she wanted to; just her eyes darted from the crowd milling in the swirling mass of smoke to the moving line of black-clad officers. As they passed, no one seemed to notice the two of them huddled in the doorway. Or maybe they didn’t care that they were there. She expected them to come to a halt far enough away to monitor the protesters, but they kept moving, raising their weapons. Finally they stopped, a line of solid black facing the crowd. For a moment, everything was eerily silent.
Then gunfire shattered the quiet, roaring in her ears, and screams filled the air. Instinctively she fought to get away. To run or to do something to stop the carnage.
Answering gunfire echoed beyond the crowd. For a moment, it looked as if they were fighting back. And she was glad. Then she realized that they had turned and were running, but they were being prevented from escaping by more agents on the other side.
“Jesus, it’s a massacre,” she said.
The screaming was less now, though the gunfire still roared.
“Gideon, we have to go and see if anyone’s alive. There were children in there.”
“They’re going through killing everyone. They’re all dead. We can’t help.”
His voice was blank, held none of the outrage pulsing through her blood. She pulled away a little and looked up into his face, clear of expression. “Would you if you could?”
“Can you even ask that?” A tic jumped in his cheek, just above the scar he’d gotten defending his country. Defending this.
Her mind was numb. “They wouldn’t kill children.” A lone gunshot resounded in the relative quiet, and she jumped. “Why, Gideon? These people have never shown any violence—they just don’t like the president’s policies. That doesn’t mean they deserve to die, does it?” She could hear her voice rising as panic and disbelief took over. Her brain was denying what it had just seen, was searching for explanations. The people had been unarmed. They were always peaceable. The agents hadn’t given them a warning, a chance to disperse. Instead they’d blocked them in. Almost herded them to a place where they had nowhere to run. Then murdered them. All, without exception. Men, women, and children.
Another lone gunshot. A shudder ran through her. She made to pull away—she had to go stop them before they killed any more. She was shaking, and Gideon grabbed her by the shoulders, gave her a hard squeeze.
“Get a fucking grip,” he said, and his tone was fierce. “It’s finished.”
He was right, the gunshots had stopped now, and the street was quiet, smoke drifting up and away, slowly dispersing. The dead were almost surrounded by a ring of black-uniformed officers. She hated it, but Gideon was right. If they tried anything now, they would both die. And it would make no difference anyway, because everyone was dead. Two of the officers parted slightly and she caught sight of a body sprawled on the ground, a mangle of crimson and purple. Paula.
A small cry escaped her, and Gideon clamped his hand over her mouth. “Quiet. We have to get out of here. You need to look as if you belong. You can’t let them see you’re rattled.”
She took a deep breath and nodded.
The thought came to her that she could do nothing if she died here today. Whereas if she lived, she might still fail, but she would goddamn die trying her best. She wouldn’t go like a lamb to the slaughter.
As they stepped out from the wide doorway, two of the agents swung round, weapons raised, and her heart stopped.
Gideon already had his hands up, one holding his Secret Service ID, the badge glinting in a shaft of sunlight that probed through the billowing smoke. One man stepped closer, took the ID, studied it for a moment, then nodded. “Captain Frome, sir. I served under you on the Wall.”
Gideon nodded. “Corporal Watson, I believe.”
“Yes, sir.” The man looked from Gideon to her. This was a man who had gunned down innocent people. Would he do the same to them? Although, ultimately, Gideon was his boss. In the end all he said was, “This is a restricted area.”
“We were caught by accident,” Gideon replied. “I was walking my girlfriend back to her office at Homeland Security. This is Supreme Court Justice Buchanan’s daughter. We’ll leave now.”
The man studied her for a moment longer, and she shivered. She tried to hold herself still, then decided that a little fear was allowed in the circumstances. It would be odder if she wasn’t affected by what she had seen. Finally, he nodded. “You can leave. But ma’am, sir, this is under the Official Privacy Act. Any mention of what you saw here will be taken as an act of treason.”
“She won’t say anything, Watson.”
“I’ll escort you to the checkpoint.”
They didn’t speak or touch as they walked through and then away from the checkpoint.
Don’t look back.
Kate could feel the agent’s eyes boring into her, but she avoided glancing over her shoulder in case it would result in some biblical punishment.
Even when they were out of earshot and sight, Kate remained mute. She had no clue what to say. It felt like the last of the world she had known had been ripped away from her, replaced by something twisted and rotten and indescribably filthy, reeking of blood and smoke.
She wanted to cry. At the same time, she was aware that no amount of tears would wash away the feeling and leave her cleansed. She wasn’t sure what, if anything, could.
Her old life was gone forever. She could no longer close her eyes and say that the Party had the best interests of the American people at heart. Paula was American, and they’d gunned her down.
They made it through her building’s security and across the foyer without her falling apart. She stumbled in the stairwell heading down to her office, and Gideon’s arm came around her waist to keep her upright.
Somehow she managed to unlock her door, slamming it closed behind them as though this was some sort of sanctuary that would keep them safe from guns and bombs. But as Gideon had said earlier, safety was an illusion.
No one was safe.
She stripped off her jacket and tossed it into the corner. It stank of smoke and death—and so did the rest of her. She longed for a long hot shower, a bottle of wine, anything to help her forget. As if she could.
Except that now, more than ever, she had to persuade Gideon to help her. This had to be stopped.
“Sit down,” she said, waving a hand at a chair.
