“Like a bomb,” Ron said. “Waiting to go off. Ah. Ah.” He seemed almost amused. There was a curiously skeptical expression on his face, a smile that was not entirely a smile.
Anson said nothing, simply met Ron’s gaze stare for stare and waited. It was an awkward moment. There was a streak of playfulness, of quicksilver unpredictability, in his father that he had never been able to deal with.
Then Ron said gravely, “Let me get this straight. We’ve been planning this attack for years and years, training our assassin with an eye to sending him in as soon as we’ve pinned down the precise location of Prime, and now we have the assassin ready but we still don’t have the location, and you want to send him in anyway? Today? Tomorrow? Isn’t this a little premature, boy? Do we even know for sure that Prime actually exists, let alone where he is?”
Like scalpel thrusts, they were. The hotheaded young leader’s idiocy neatly laid bare, just as Anson had feared and expected and even hoped it would be. He felt his cheeks flaming. It became all that he could manage to keep his eyes on Ron’s. He felt his headache beginning to get going.
Lamely he said, “The pressure’s been rising inside me for weeks, Dad. Longer, maybe. I get the feeling that I’m letting the whole world down by holding Tony back this long. And then my head starts pounding. It’s pounding now.”
“Take an aspirin, then. Take two. We’ve still got plenty on hand.”
Anson recoiled as though he had been struck.
But Ron didn’t seem to notice. He was wearing that strange smile again. “Listen, Anson, the Entities have been here for forty years. We’ve all been holding ourselves back, all this time. Except for the suicidally addlebrained laser strike that brought the Great Plague down on us before you were born, and Khalid’s uniquely successful and perhaps unduplicatable one-man attack, we haven’t lifted a finger against them in all that time. Your grandfather grew old and died, miserable because the world had been enslaved by these aliens but only too well aware that it would be dumb to try any hostile action before we understood what we were doing. Your Uncle Anse sat stewing on this very mountain decade after decade, drinking himself silly for the same reason. I’ve held things together pretty well, I suppose, but I’m not going to last forever either, and don’t you think I’d like to see the Entities on the run before I check out? So we’ve all had our little lesson in patience to learn. You’re what, thirty-five years old?”
“Thirty-four.”
“Thirty-four. By that age you should have learned how to keep yourself from flying off the handle.”
“I don’t think I am flying off the handle. But what I’m afraid of is that Tony’s training will lose its edge if we hold him back much longer. We’ve been winding him up for this project for the past seven years. He could be getting overtrained by now.”
“Fine. So first thing tomorrow you’ll send him into L.A. with a gun on each hip and a belt full of grenades around his waist, and he’ll walk up to the first Entity he sees and say, ‘Pardon me, sir, can you give me Prime’s address?’ Is that how you imagine it? If you don’t know where your target is, where do you throw your bomb?”
“I’ve thought of all these things.”
“And you still want to send him? Tony’s your brother. It isn’t as though you’ve got lots of others. Are you really ready to have him get killed?”
“He’s a Carmichael, Dad. He’s understood the risks from the beginning.”
Ron made a groaning sound. “A Carmichael! A Carmichael! My God, Anson, do I have to listen to that bullshit right to the end of my days? What does being a Carmichael mean, anyway? Disapproving of your own children’s behavior, like the Colonel, and cutting them out of your life for years at a time? Twisting yourself inside out for the sake of an ideal and obliterating yourself with drink so you can go on living with yourself, the way Anse did? Or winding up like the Colonel’s brother Mike, maybe, the one who got himself into such a bind over his notions of proper behavior that he went and found himself a hero’s death the day the Entities landed? Is it your notion that Tony’s supposed to go waltzing to his certain death on a crazy mission simply because he had the bad luck to be born into a family of fanatic disciplinarians and hyper-achievers?”
Anson peered at him, horrified. These were words he had never expected to hear, and they came crashing into him with stunning impact. Ron was red-faced and trembling, practically apoplectic. But after a moment he became a little calmer.
He said, once more smiling in that bemused way, “Well, well, well, listen to the old guy rant and rave! All that sound and fury.—Look here, Anson, I know you want to be the general who launches the victorious counteroffensive against the dread invaders. We all wanted that, and maybe you’ll actually be the one. But don’t waste Tony so soon, all right? Can’t you hang on at least until you’ve got some decent idea of where Prime may be? Aren’t Steve and Andy still trying to work out some kind of precise pinpointing?”
“Steve has been doing just that, yes. With occasional help from Andy, whenever Andy can be bothered. They’re pretty sure that L.A.’s the place where Prime is stashed away, probably downtown, but they can’t get it any more precise than that. And now Steve tells me, though, that he’s hit a wall. He thinks Andy’s the only hacker good enough to get beyond the blockage. But Andy’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Skipped out in the night, last night. Something about getting La-La pregnant and not wanting to stay around.”
“No! The miserable little bastard!”
“We’ll try to find him and bring him back. But we don’t even know where to begin looking for him.”
“Well, figure it out. Catch him and yank him home and sit him down in the communications room until he tells you exactly where Prime is, which part of town, what building. And then send in Tony. Not before, not until you know the location right down to the street address. Okay?”
Anson rubbed his right temple. Was the pounding subsiding a little in there? Perhaps. A little, anyway. A little.
He said, “You think sending him now is really crazy, then?”
“I sure do, boy.”
“That’s what I needed you to tell me.”
Khalid said, pointing toward the hawk that came riding up over the crest of the mountain on the wind from the sea, “You see the bird, there? Kill it.”
Unhesitatingly Tony raised his rifle, sighting and aiming and pulling the trigger all in one smooth unhurried continuous process. The hawk, black against the blue shield of the sky, exploded into a flurry of scattering feathers and began to plummet toward the bare stony meadow in which they stood.
Tony was perfect, Khalid thought. He was a magnificent machine. A machine of Khalid’s own creation, flawless, the finest thing he had ever shaped. A superbly crafted mechanism.
“Very nice shot. Now you, Rasheed.”
The slender boy with amber-toned skin at Khalid’s side lifted his gun and shot without seeming even to aim. The bullet caught the falling hawk squarely in the chest and knocked it spinning off on a new trajectory that sent it over to their left, down into the dark impenetrable tangle of chaparral that ran just below the summit.
Khalid gave the boy an approving smile. He was fourteen now, already shoulder-high to his long-legged father, a superb marksman. Khalid often took him along on these back-country training sessions with Tony. He loved the sight of him, his wiry athletic form, his luminous intelligent green eyes, his corona of coppery hair. Rasheed too was perfect, in a different way from Tony. His perfection was not that of a machine but of a person. It was wonderful to have made a boy like Rasheed. Rasheed was the boy Khalid might have been, if only things had gone otherwise for him when he was young. Rasheed was Khalid’s second chance at life.
To Tony, Khalid said, “And what do you feel, killing the bird?”
“It was a good shot. I’m pleased when I shoot that well.”
“And the bird? What do you think about the bird?”
“Why should I think about the bird? The bird was nothing to me.”
It was just before dawn when Andy reached Los Angeles. The first thing he did, after letting himself through the wall at the Santa Monica gate with the LACON credentials that he had whipped up for himself the week before, was to jack himself into a public-access terminal that he located at Wilshire and Fifth. He needed to update his map of the city. He might be staving here quite some time, several months at the very least, and Andy knew that the
