'Don't know. Not sure how tech-dependent they are. But don't worry. The stock markets are gonna crash, no doubt about it.'
'Have we any chance of getting command and control?'
'Nothing's changed there. They'll still have full military capability, except to the extent that domestic chaos cripples it.'
Gaudet hung up without another word and turned to Trotsky. 'Make sure our investors aren't the only ones with put options. I want plenty, and well disguised.'
'I've been buying for weeks.' Trotsky seemed offended.
Gaudet didn't respond to that comment. He checked his watch. 'How long?'
'They're strolling. How long we don't know.'
'I want to watch the bastard die.'
'I think that is a bad idea.'
'I don't give a shit.'
'Remote revenge is underrated.' Trotsky smiled again. Twice in a day. 'Think of it as a private jubilation of the imagination.'
Grady called Sam, determined that she would go alone with Michael to get the journals and equally determined that she would put up a fight as necessary. There was no way Sam would agree and the odds of convincing him had to be near zero. In order to make the call, she walked down the street because she wasn't going to argue with Sam in front of Michael. They weren't far from the middle of Manhattan and there were plenty of people on the street. She supposed the thing that bothered her the most was that if he said no, she wouldn't go. The cabbie didn't seem to mind stopping as long as he had his meter running.
'Sam, we have to talk about something.'
'I can always tell when you're loaded for bear.' Grady tapped her foot for a moment and didn't say anything. It pissed her off that he had already put her in a neat, little box. It was the rebellious-brat-employee box.
'I want to go very low profile with Michael and pick up his journals. It's either that or he goes alone.'
'You think it's a good idea?'
'It's better that I go than nobody goes. He needs a guide in this country. Surely, you've noticed that.'
'If you want to, go ahead. Tell Yodo what you want.'
'I want to pick them up halfway between Manhattan and Ithaca. Somewhere remote. And then I want Michael to lock the journals away in a vault when we get back.'
'Good plan. Jill can arrange for the vault.'
'Anything else?' she asked, unable to believe his re sponse.
'Make a copy of the 1998 journal and courier it to the office. Jill can provide the courier. Also make copies of all the journals and have them locked somewhere else, where only Michael can get them. Jill could probably help you with that as well.'
'Sam, are you feeling okay?'
'You're grown-up now. And that means I have to be will ing to let you die.'
Grady froze up when he said that. 'You never said anything like that before.'
'I respect you and, I think, to a certain degree you can act like a real contract agent. I'm not always going to be there to yank your butt from the jaws of defeat.'
'This is one hell of a cold fatherly talk.' Then she laughed because she didn't know what else to do.
' 'Treat every failure as a new beginning.' My mother said that. I believe in you.'
Grady walked back down the sidewalk, feeling frightened… and proud.
'If we hurry, we can be back in time for lunch tomorrow,' she said to Michael.
'I already called Rebecca and told her the meeting would have to be put off-maybe for a few days. She was very disappointed, but I have to make it up to her by taking her hik ing in the California mountains. That woman is a negotiator.'
Yodo came walking toward them. Obviously, he had already talked to Sam.
'Good luck.' He held out his hand and Grady shook it.
'What'll you be, a pallbearer?' Grady smiled.
Sam and Anna walked along the edge of Central Park toward the Plaza Hotel. Tonight he had a blond handlebar mustache and blond hair with eyebrows to match and wore a beret. Anna wore a Snoopy hat complete with earflaps. Looking at her, a person would never think celebrity. The driver of a horse-drawn carriage shivered in the autumn cold and snubbed his cigarette under a Red Wing boot. Sam could tell that Anna wanted to take a ride through the city. The horse pawed the pavement, maybe bored, maybe pissed off. Since the horse's ears were forward, Sam banked on bored and ready to go.
'Take us on a thirty-minute round,' Sam said.
In the carriage was a heavy blanket. Sam pulled it over them. He wanted to think, and it didn't surprise him that Anna knew his mood. Under the blanket she put her hand on his arm and looked off at the people and shops as they rode down Fifth Avenue. Sam knew he was at a crossroads in his life. There were decisions made at forty-two that could not be made at sixty-two. There were choices a man could re gret, some irreversible, and he didn't want to make one of those.
He thought about his grandfather and a talk they once had. Sam had been trying to decide about a young woman in his neighborhood who wanted to go away to college, but she had become so infatuated with Sam that she was losing her will to leave home. Sam wanted her to stay because he wanted to hang out with her, but at the same time he be lieved that for her own sake she should leave and go to school and get a career. It was a struggle.
'I want to tell you a story,' he said to Anna. 'A story my grandfather told to me.'
'Shoot.'
'It may be a little corny.' Sam grinned.
'Corny is good when you're pregnant. You have to make your thinking more basic.'
'Back before my grandfather's time, the Tiloks had a very old chief. One tooth left in his head just before he died. Black Hawk. Called himself Jones to the whites. Grandfather had a painting of him and talked about how he kept the tribe from violence.'
'I suppose the tooth part is apropos of nothing but a lack of dentistry,' Anna joked.
Sam loved her sense of humor.
'So, Black Hawk was confronted with a choice of two men to be his successor. One was Charles Curtis, the other Andrew Wiley. Wiley had many enemies. He was arrogant and contentious, but also strong and impressive, and men followed him. Nobody could beat him in wrestling. Curtis was a good planner; he could read and write and he helped the widows. And he understood growing crops. He never talked of gaming revenge on the whites-unlike Wiley, who doted on the fantasy.
'Black Hawk needed to choose one of the two men. If he chose Wiley, the young men would be happy, at least most of them. There were a few young men, those more educated in the white man's ways, who wanted Curtis and would have nothing of Wiley. These men tended to live off the reserva tion. In his heart Black Hawk knew that for the future, living with the white man and abiding by his laws, Curtis was the best choice for the people. But on his deathbed the chief wanted also to please the young men.
'Black Hawk devised a test question to determine the best man for the job: 'Suppose the white man's government came to the village and wanted to buy a piece of the reservation for very little money. Suppose the money was so little and the land was so great that the tribe might not survive, so that the white man was stealing our future. Suppose there were two ideas. One idea was for the chief to starve himself and to tell the white man's newspaper of the injustice. The other was for the strongest braves to take a hostage, a power ful white man in the government who was known to be traveling in the area. What would you do?'
'Wiley was quick to answer: 'The men would sneak out at night and at daybreak, in the gray of the morning, they would take the government man and blindfold him so that he could not recognize them; then they would hide him in the mountains, where no one could find him. They would offer next to negotiate for their land and say nothing of the gov ernment man or his whereabouts. If they could not change the mind of the white men in the negotiation, they would at least kill their hostage and they would take more government men in the night and kill them as well, and they would have some retribution for their loss.'
