“Commissioner!” someone yelled. “Sir!”
He moved out of the line, toward the voice. He waded through the curtain of smoke, unable to peg the sounds.
“Where are you?” he called.
“Here, sir. Over here!”
A flashlight beam was wiggling through the haze, coming back at him. He walked to the beam, tracing it back like a lifeline. A uniformed captain was attached to the other end.
“What have you got?” Hauk asked when he got up on the man.
“Here… something.”
He tilted the beam in the other direction. Something as bright and orange as a gasoline fire was billowing into the light
“The chute,” Hauk said.
They moved toward the thing, twenty yards in the distance. It was trying to rise in the natural updraft between the buildings, but the low pressure kept pushing it back down. They followed the chute lines for another thirty feet and found the pod.
It was round, the size of a weather balloon and was solidly imbedded in the side of a building, only about half exposed. Hauk ran up to it. The hatch was already open.
“Damn.” He leaned over the opening and looked inside. The monitor board was blipping happily, but the pod was empty. The President’s vital signs were there; he was gone.
The captain was at his elbow. “Look.”
He looked. The man was pointing.
A figure was moving out of the smoke and the darkness toward them. It moved slowly, shuffling.
The captain brought a rifle up beside Hauk. The Commissioner pushed it aside. He could hear the sound of weapons being primed off in the smoke.
“Hold your fire!” he barked into the haze.
The figure, gauzy and ethereal, came closer. It was a man or least it had once been. Hauk started moving toward him. He was thin like ice on the Hudson, pale and wispy as the gray smoke that stirred around him, clinging to his ragged clothes. He was living death, a walking corpse. He stopped
“I’m Romero,” he rasped.
Hauk walked right up to him, smelling the rot that rolled out of his mouth and passed for breath. “I’m Hauk.”
“I know.”
Romero smiled broadly, a grinning deathshead smile. All of his teeth had been filed down to tiny, razor sharp points. He spoke slowly, dragging the words up painfully through the slime pit of his lungs. “If you touch me,” he said, “he dies. If you’re not in the air in thirty seconds, he dies. If you come back in, he dies.”
Hauk just stared at him, trying to read behind the lifeless, sunken eyes. Couldn’t.
“I have something for you,” Romero said, and held out his hand. Hauk reached out, never taking his eyes off Romero’s. The man, chuckling softly, dropped something lightly in his palm.
Hauk looked down to see a small, rolled up cloth.
Blood had soaked through it. He looked once at Romero’s grinning teeth and unwound the wrapping. It contained a finger, severed at the third joint. There was a ring on the finger. And on the ring-the Presidential seal.
Hauk raised his eyes once more to Romero.
“Twenty seconds,” the man said.
“I’m ready to talk.”
“Nineteen. Eighteen.”
“What do you want?”
Romero just grinned-a mask, a grinning demon in human disguise.
“Seventeen. Sixteen.”
Hauk realized that the man had no idea what he wanted. He started backing away, never taking his eyes from Romero. He waved his hand above his head.
“Let’s go. Let’s go!”
There were shouts, confusion. They didn’t want to go. The tension was built and demanded release. Somewhere in the smoke, a gun went off.
Hauk was screaming now, trying to control them with his fury. “Hold your fire, goddamnit! Hold it!”
“Fifteen. Fourteen.”
Hauk turned his back on Romero and ran into the midst of his people. He started grabbing them, turning them back toward the distant copters.
“We’re getting out of here,” he screamed. “Let’s go! Now!”
They started turning, reluctantly.
“Move, damnit! Run!”
Finally they turned and committed, putting the stoppers back on their lust for a little while, Hauk made sure they were all leaving, then turned back to Romero. He was gone.
He ran quickly to the command copter and ordered the pilot into the sky as soon as he got in. His insides were jangling, raw, exposed nerves.
They had him. The lunatics had the President, and god only knew what they had in mind.
It began, finally, to rain.
VII
EXECUTIVE CONFERENCE SUITE
8:53 P.M.
Hauk walked alone down the unlit hallway. Office doors were open down the hall’s length, some of them spilling globs of harsh neon light out into the corridor like tiny drifts of white, powdered snow. It had been a long time since Hauk had seen snow that was any color except dingy gray brown.
The Secretary of State was waiting for him in conference. He had been traveling in a follow-up plane that came behind the President’s, to avoid any accidents that could claim too many important lives. He was going to ask what they were going to do about the President.
Hauk had a very specific feeling about that. He felt that they should simply get themselves another President. He wasn’t going to say that to the Secretary, though. He was too much of a soldier for that
He arrived at the conference door and hesitated for a second before going in. He looked like a wreck. His face and clothes were dirty and sooty from the smoke. His eyes burned and his mouth was dry and overridden with a taste of plastic. He had lost his coat out on the landing field.
The Secretary was a man used to taking orders, not giving them. He would want Hauk to take as much responsibility for whatever was going to happen as he could. Hauk didn’t like that, but he didn’t see any way around it.
He opened the door. It was bright in the room, garish. The Secretary had turned on every light in the place, almost as if he were afraid of dealing with the dark corners. All the windows were shut tight to keep out any trace of the gas that wasn’t coming down with the light rain outside. It was stuffy in the room due to the lack of circulating air. With no ventilation, cigarette smoke hazed the air, hanging down in sleepy, drifting clouds.
The Secretary sat at the big walnut conference table, red telephone by one arm, already-full ashtray by the other. He was a slight man dressed in a gray suit. His eyes were fixed, staring vacantly at the large map of the city that occupied the entire wall opposite him. His face was probably amiable generally, but now that it was transfixed by worry it was an ugly face. He seemed, like most politicians, to be on the very edge of exhaustion, with a small outer fence of desperation the only thing holding him in one piece.
