12
I awoke to some bad news, some good news, and some more bad news. The bad news was that I was up on a wooden platform, hands securely strapped over my head to some kind of skeletal metal frame; since I didn't recognize anything in my surroundings, I assumed I was in another room on the third floor of the triplex.
The good news was that Garth was there beside me, alive.
The bad news was that he was also strapped to the frame. Judging from the dried blood on his wrists around the leather thongs that cut into his flesh, he'd spent a good deal of time trying-unsuccessfully, obviously-to free himself. It didn't bode well.
'Hey, Mongo,' Garth said to me when he saw that I was conscious. 'You okay?'
'Is that a rhetorical question?'
'You've got a hell of a bump on your forehead, and two black eyes. Are you hurting?'
'I'm betting I've got an even bigger bump on the back of my head, but it's nothing that a couple of aspirin won't fix. You?'
'I'm all right-but the situation kind of sucks, doesn't it?'
'Yeah.'
'Shit,' my brother said with a thin smile. 'You can't rescue anybody. What the hell good are you?'
'I didn't even know you were here, brother,' I said tightly. Now that I saw that Garth was alive, my relief at finding him was being rapidly supplanted by anger-and I didn't care if it showed. 'I didn't know where you were, or whether you were dead or alive, and for some reason that bothered me just a tad-especially when I recalled what William Kenecky looked like when he finally turned up. I was on my way up here to confront the old man.'
'Blaisdel's dead, you know. Probably has been for years.'
'Yeah; I saw the mummy downstairs. And by the way, I checked through all the files in your office, and couldn't find even a teeny-weeny clue as to what you were up to, or where you were going. That's a procedure we're definitely going to have to change, even if it's in the next life. Where the hell did they catch you?'
Garth studied me for a few moments with his limpid brown eyes, then looked away. 'Here,' he replied evenly. 'I figured Blaisdel would certainly know where the girl was, and I wanted to go right at him; I was tired of all the complications and bullshit.'
'You'd already made your decision the last time we talked, hadn't you? Even then, you knew Goddamn well that you were going to try to break in here.'
Now Garth looked at me again, nodded. 'Yeah,' he said quietly. 'I thought I'd figured out a way to bypass the security system, and I figured that if I could get close enough to Blaisdel to put a gun to his head, we'd find out fast enough where Vicky Brown is. Obviously, I missed a circuit somewhere; those two ballplayers, Velazian and Rokan, got me on the way in.'
'Because I didn't want you to know,' he replied matter-of-factly. 'I was planning a forced entry, trespassing, and assault on one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. After we found Vicky Brown and made certain she was going to be all right, I didn't care what happened to me; I did care what happened to you. Just by telling you what I was going to do, I'd have made you an accessory to a series of major crimes. You'd have lost your license and your business. Considering that, I couldn't see the sense in involving you in what I considered to be a one-man job.'
'Let me tell you something, brother,' I said tightly. 'You're lucky I'm tied up, because if I wasn't I'd sure as hell go to work on your nose again. Flow do you know I wouldn't have agreed with you? What the hell do you think I'm doing here now? It's true that I came looking for information on you, but why did you assume I wouldn't have done the same for Vicky Brown?'
'You would have. That's my point. You'd have agreed, and you'd have insisted on coming along. I wanted to keep you out of this particular little venture.'
'If you weren't my brother, and if I didn't love you, I think I'd call you a shithead. Sometimes you really piss me off.'
'How tight are those straps of yours, Mongo?'
I wriggled a bit, wriggled harder, then started really heaving myself around. The leather straps on my wrists and ankles held tight, and I could easily understand how Garth had cut himself trying to get away. 'Tight,' I said.
'Anything in your bag of tricks that might get us off this frame?'
'Not that I can think of at the moment.'
'Then we've got a real problem, Mongo.'
'No shit?'
'You don't understand.'
'I understand that I don't like being tied up here. But if they just mean to leave us here to die of thirst and starvation, why didn't they simply off us and be done with it?'
'Probably because they're getting their jollies out of letting us think about what's going to happen; with these guys, it's anybody's guess what they're thinking.'
'Uh, what's going to happen?'
'Look behind you.'
I was spread-eagled to the frame in such a way that it was hard for me to turn my head, but by arching my back and craning my neck it was possible for me to catch a glimpse of what was being supported by the skeletal, boxlike apparatus: it looked like a massive steel cannister, perhaps twelve feet high and more than a yard in diameter, bristling with red, yellow, and blue wires. I swallowed hard, found that my mouth was dry.
'A bomb?' I croaked, looking back at my brother.
'Not just any old bomb, Mongo,' Garth replied softly. 'What we've got at our backs is the guts of a B-53-a hydrogen bomb, with a built-in nuclear device to set it off. It has a yield of nine megatons-the equivalent of seven hundred and fifty of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima. If that thing goes off, Manhattan will be vaporized, and all of the other boroughs will be flattened. Millions of people are going to die, Mongo-not only here, but in Detroit, and Israel, and maybe a few other sites. What happens after that will depend, I suppose, on who the various world leaders think is responsible. Blaisdel-when he was alive-Kenecky, and Peter Patton believed that the explosions would trigger a nuclear war with Russia, because the Bible told them so. I don't know where they found that in the Bible, but they may have been on to something. This bomb, and the others like it, will be triggered by a radio signal beamed by satellite at exactly midnight, New Year's Eve, unless we can find a way to stop it.'
Numb with horror, I moved my lips-but no sound came out. Then I realized that I really had nothing to say. I started desperately jerking my body around on the frame; I stopped and let my body sag when I felt blood begin to ooze from the cuts on my wrists and flow down my forearms. 'Jesus Christ,' I groaned.
'That's who they think ordered this all up,' Garth said softly.
'How the hell could they get hold of hydrogen bombs?'
'It probably wasn't nearly as difficult for somebody like Blaisdel as we'd all like to think it should be. For decades, he had his fingers in just about every military production pie there was. He owned a number of bomb production plants that operated under the aegis of the Department of Energy. In the sixties he was building some components of hydrogen bombs-B-53s-for them. They used to be fitted on the Strategic Air Command's B-52 Stratofortresses, but SAC mothballed them in 1983 and went to smaller bombs and Cruise missiles. Then, a while back, the Pentagon made a rather quiet decision to start taking them out of mothballs-probably because the generals are a little concerned that all the newer gadgets aren't nearly as reliable as they're supposed to be; they wanted some serious, proven firepower on hand. That much is for certain. My guess is that if we had access to classified information we'd find out that Blaisdel's facilities were used to store the bombs; he had access, and he somehow managed-or made it possible for his lieutenants to manage-to spirit away three or more of them. Considering all the talent he had working for him, it's even conceivable that he had his own built.'
'How do you know all this?'
'I spent a lot of time in the library checking up on Blaisdel, remember? That's where I found out about the
