“Oh yes, indeed.” Cheung smiled happily. “To your very good health!” He raised his glass. Reynolds perforce followed suit and submitted to another five minutes of trivial niceties. “We considered putting some elements of this proposal to you all those years ago, in Catford, but the unfortunate excess of zeal displayed by the Polis impressed upon us the need for discretion. Now, however, anything we choose to confide in you is unlikely to be beaten out of you by the royalist inquisitors. So: another toast, to our future business success!”
Reynolds blinked as he answered the toast: This was very much
Cheung glanced around before he replied. “You must have realized that I had a most effective way of moving dispatches and contraband between locations, without fear of interception.” Reynolds nodded. “Well, that … mechanism … is still available. And I believe that, given the nature of your current engagement, you might very well find a use for it.” Reynolds nodded again, slightly perturbed.
The bartender—Scott—bowed slightly, then stepped in front of the table. “Observe,” he told Reynolds. He looked away, in the direction of the archway leading to the kitchen. Then he vanished.
“This is our family secret,” Reynolds heard Cheung saying behind him as he waved his arms through the thin air where Scott had stood: “We can walk between worlds. We have had to hold this to ourselves, in utter confidence, for generations; I’m sure you can imagine the consequences if word were to leak out in public. However, I know you to be a man of utmost probity and integrity, and in your new and elevated rank, I am certain you will recognize the desirability to keep this a secret as close to your chest as any matter of state. I brought the doctor along because he can explain to you the origins, transmission, and limits of our family talent better than I; it is hereditary, and we have never met any people to whom we are not blood kin who can do it.…”
Reynolds swallowed: His heart was hammering. “Business,” he said hollowly. “
“I want to put my family at your service,” said Cheung. His expression was bland. “I am certain you will find our unique talent very valuable indeed. These are dangerous times; the party has many enemies. I hope that you —we—will better be able to defend it if we can come to a working agreement?”
Reynolds licked suddenly dry lips. “How many of you are there?” he asked.
“Seventy adults, able to perform at will, and their children. Two hundred other relatives, some of whose offspring may be able to do so. And Dr. ven Hjalmar has a proposal that will, I am sorry to say, strike you as something out of a philosophical romance, but which may revolutionize our capacity in the longer term, ten years or more.”
Reynolds glanced round again, just as a young man—half a head shorter than the absent Scott—appeared out of thin air, bowed deeply to him, and moved to take up his station behind the bar. He swallowed again, mind churning like a millrace. “How much do you want?” he asked.
Cheung smiled. “Perhaps Dr. ven Hjalmar should start by telling you exactly what is on sale. We can discuss the price later…”
7/16
On the eighth floor of a department store just off Eighteenth Street NW in Washington, D.C., there was a locked janitor’s closet. Earlier that morning the police had been busy downstairs. A security guard had been found dead in a customer restroom, evidently the victim of an accidental heroin overdose. Nobody, in the ensuing fuss, had felt any need to fetch cleaning supplies from this particular closet, and so, nobody had discovered that the door was not only locked but the lock was jammed, so that the key wouldn’t turn.
Because nobody had visited the room, nobody had called a locksmith. And because the door remained locked, nobody had noticed the presence of an abandoned janitor’s trolley, its cylindrical plastic trash can weighted down by something heavy. Nor had anyone, in an attempt to move the trolley, discovered that its wheels were jammed as thoroughly as the lock on the door. And nobody had raised the lid on the trash can and, staring inside, recognized the olive-drab cylinder for what it was: a SADM—storable atomic demolition munition—in its field carrier, connected to a live detonation sequencer (its cover similarly glued shut), a very long way indeed from its designated storage cell in a bunker at the Pantex plant in West Texas.
The janitor’s store was approximately 450 meters—two blocks—away from Lafayette Square and, opposite it, the White House; and it was about ten meters above the roofline of that building.
The detonation sequencer was, at heart, little more than a countdown timer—a milspec timer, with a set of thumbwheels to enter the permissive action codes, and more thumbwheels to enter the countdown time and desired yield. Beneath the glued-down cover were additional test and fault lights and switches. From the timer emerged a fat cable that screwed onto a multi-pin socket on the outside of the bomb carrier. Inside the carrier nestled one of the smallest atomic bombs ever assembled, so compact that a strong man with a suitable backpack frame could actually carry it. But not for much longer.
Eleven-sixteen and twelve seconds, on the morning of July 16, 2003.
Stop all the clocks. All of them.
* * *
It was a regular summer day in Washington, D.C. Open-topped tourist buses carried their camera-snapping cargo around the sights on Capitol Hill—itself something of a misnomer, for the gentle slope of the Mall was anything but mountainous—past the reflecting pool, the Washington Monument, the museums and administrative buildings and white stone–clad porticoes of power. In hundreds of offices, stores, restaurants, and businesses around the center ordinary people were at work.
Like Nazma Hussein, aged twenty-six, daughter of Yemeni immigrants, married to Ali the cook, cleaning and setting out tables in the front of her family’s small lunch diner on K Street NW, worrying about her younger sister Ayesha who is having trouble at school: Papa wants her to come and work in the restaurant until he and Baba can find her a suitable husband, but Nazma thinks she can do better—
Like Ryan Baylor, aged twenty-three, a law student at GWU, hurrying along H Street to get to the Burns Law Library and swearing quietly under his breath—overslept, forgot to set his alarm, got a reading list as long as his arm and a hangover beating a brazen kettledrum counterpoint to the traffic noise as he wonders if those cans of Coors were really a good idea the evening before a test—
Like Ashanda Roe, aged twenty-eight, working a dead-end shelf-stacking job in a 7-Eleven on D Street NW, sweating as she tears open boxes of Depends and shoves them into position on an end galley, tossing the packaging into a rattly cage and whistling under her breath. She’s worrying because her son Darrick, who is only seven, is spending too much time with a bunch of no-good kids who hang out with—
Six thousand, two hundred and eighty-six other people, ordinary people, men and women and children, tourists and natives, illegal immigrants and blue bloods, homeless vagrants and ambassadors—
Stop all the clocks.
* * *
In the grand scheme of things, in the recondite world of nuclear war planning, a one-kiloton atomic bomb doesn’t sound like much. It’s less than a tenth the yield of the weapon that leveled the heart of Hiroshima, a two- hundredth the power of a single warhead from a Minuteman or Trident missile. But the destructive force of a nuclear weapon doesn’t correspond directly to its nominal yield; a bomb with ten times the explosive power doesn’t cause ten times as much destruction as a smaller one.
Oliver Hjorth’s first bomb detonated at twelve seconds past eleven-sixteen, on the eighth floor of a steel- framed concrete department store about a third of a mile from the White House.
Within a hundredth of a second, the department store building and everything else on its block vanished (along with fifty-seven staff and one hundred and fourteen shoppers), swallowed by a white-hot sphere of superheated gas and molten dust. The department store’s neighbors, out to a radius of a block, survived a fraction of a second longer, their stone and concrete facades scorching and beginning to smoke, until the expanding shock wave, air compressed and flash-heated to thousands of degrees, rammed into them like a runaway train.
