“Nada,” Otto said.
“That’s all I need to know,” McGarvey said. “We’re wiring his suit and mine right now.”
“One other thing. I just found out that Anne Marie Marinaccio and two of her people were assassinated in Dubai. No suspects. Thought you’d want to know.”
“DeCamp?”
“We’ll probably never know.”
EIGHTY
Schlagel’s magnified voice had started to roll over the crowd from the south a few minutes before McGarvey, dressed in a hazmat suit, the hood covering his head, darted across the street to the main gate, where he paused for just a moment.
According to Otto the mass exodus from all across the country was still flowing across Florida’s borders to this very spot with no end in sight even though Schlagel was on the verge of what was being hailed as his most important sermon ever. Hundreds, perhaps as many as one thousand boats stood offshore from the nuclear power station, some within shouting distance of the beach. A pair of Coast Guard cutters from Miami were standing by with orders not to interfere except in an emergency. Helicopters from the local affiliates of all the major television networks hovered overhead like paparazzi around royalty. The collective murmur of the crowd was that of an eager audience waiting for the show to begin.
A circus, McGarvey thought as he turned and went across the parking lot and inside the South Service Building’s lobby where he held up at the open door. He took off his hood and laid it on the bare concrete floor.
“You copy?” he asked.
“Yes,” Otto’s voice came back in his earpiece. “Are you in place?”
“I’m here,” McGarvey said. “Stand by.”
With the door open he could hear Schlagel’s voice, but it was difficult to make out what the man was saying, because the speakers were all turned toward the crowd. He closed the heavy glass doors and the noises from outside were sharply muted, all but inaudible.
He opened the doors again. “Good enough,” he said. “We have a shot, I think.”
“Only if his ego is as big as we think it is,” Otto came back. “And you’ll have a feed to your cell phone when you need it.”
“Have you ever known a man in his position whose ego wasn’t off the chart?” McGarvey asked rhetorically. “Gail?”
“Here.”
“He’s on his way.”
“I can hear him, he’s getting close,” Gail radioed.
“You need to be obsequious.”
“I know the word, doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“Is Eric linked with us?” McGarvey asked Otto.
“Here,” Yablonski said from his computer center. “And I’ve known Gail a lot longer than you guys and I can tell you with near one hundred percent confidence that she might know the word, but there’s never been a subservient bone in her body.”
“Okay, people, showtime,” Otto broke in. “Gail, you ready?”
“I’m outside the hazmat tent, no suit,” Gail replied. “He just pulled up on the other side of the barrier, about fifty yards away. I’m on my obsequious way. As if any of you sexist pigs ever knew the meaning of the word.”
“Are you armed?” Yablonski asked.
“Negative. My magazine only holds seventeen rounds, not a hundred thousand. This is Kirk’s show not mine.”
McGarvey could hear the strain in her voice.
Schlagel was shouting something but his words were no less clear now than they had been earlier. But from McGarvey’s vantage point at the lobby doors he could make out the reverend’s figure standing above the heads of the vast crowd, the nervous National Guard troops who were already starting to edge away, and Gail in a light sweatshirt and jeans walking up the middle of A1A.
“I can’t make out what he’s saying,” McGarvey radioed.
“He’s thanking his faithful for making this important pilgrimage,” Gail said. “God’s righteous work. ‘Let it begin here and now.’”
Then Schlagel’s voice was being picked up by Gail’s comms unit, the microphone of which was concealed inside her NNSA dark blue windbreaker, but what he was saying made little or no sense to McGarvey, something about swift justice and then peace and bliss would cover the land as if “directed by a booming voice come down from the heavens.”
“Okay, I’m hearing him now,” McGarvey said. “Does he have a security detail?”
“Four of them. Looks like they know what they’re doing. Sharp.”
“He has to come in alone.”
“Reverend Schlagel!” Gail shouted. “Reverend!”
Someone yelled something that McGarvey couldn’t make out, and suddenly there was a lot of noise, more people shouting, and what sounded like scuffling, heavy breathing.
“Just a moment, just a moment!” Schlagel shouted.
“Gail Newby, National Nuclear Security Administration. Someone here from Washington needs to speak with you, sir. It’s extremely urgent.”
Gail’s comms unit was picking up other voices, but they were garbled, and McGarvey could only make out a word here and there, something about risk, no necessity, no reason for it.”
“I can personally guarantee your safety, sir,” Gail said.
Someone, maybe Schalgel, asked who it was.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“The hell with that.”
“He’s indirectly from the White House, sir. And as I said, this is extremely urgent. National importance. In fact he’s begging you for your help.”
“Nice touch,” McGarvey said.
“I’m not armed,” Gail said. “Besides the National Guard is here along with the media. You’d be perfectly safe.”
“Where is this meeting to be held?” Schalgel asked, his voice suddenly clear.
“The lobby of the South Service Building,” Gail said. “You’d have to wear a hazmat suit, but the radiation is minimal, and the meeting will only take a minute or two.”
“This representative from President Lord is waiting for me now?”
“He took the bait,” Otto said.
“Yes, sir,” Gail said. “He arrived just a few minutes ago, aboard a National Guard helicopter. You might have seen it.”
Schlagel’s voice became indistinct again, mixed with other urgent voices, but it was clear enough in McGarvey’s earbud that the reverend was arguing with his minders. And it only lasted for a minute.
“I have a sermon to finish, so let’s make this quick,” Schlagel said.
“Just this way, sir, to the decontamination tent,” Gail said.
Someone else had taken up the microphone and was speaking to the crowd now, though McGarvey could no longer make out what was being said as Gail and Schlagel headed past the barrier.
“Okay, he’s taken the bait,” Otto said. “Mac, are you set?”
“Yes, but don’t enable the links until ten seconds after you hear me say, I’ll close the doors.”
“Roger that.”
McGarvey watched from the relative darkness just inside the lobby but it seemed to take forever before Gail and Schlagel appeared on the roadway and went into the decontamination tent. And even longer before the
