Magic Time Read online

  He smiled a little in the dim glow of the candles that had been set around the duty room in the elaborate candelabra sent across to them by Jan McKay: centerpieces from any number of White House dinners. The golden light reminded him of nights in his childhood, when there’d been a little hiccup between NOPSI’s electricity cut-off date and Dad’s paycheck, or when Georges or Betsy or Andrew had roared through town and water had stood in the street up to the porch. Dad would bed everyone down in the living room on blankets and tell stories in front of a dead TV, taking all the voices and the special effects himself, a thousand times better than anything on Star Trek or MASH.

  Funny, he thought, what the glow of a candle could do.

  “So what do you think?” Cox looked up as Witjas, one of the younger men, came in with the hand-printed list of agents: who had checked in, who lived where, who might be expected to show up tomorrow.

  “I think anybody who hasn’t shown up by this time isn’t gonna.” The young man tossed the papers on the gray metal table. “I was just out. Looks like more fires in Anacostia.”

  “Oh, great,” muttered Cox, trying to sound pissed instead of scared. “What the hell is it about your people, Larry? Things fuck up, and they start wreckin’ their own neighborhoods.” He turned back to Witjas without waiting for a reply—which was fortunate, since Shango made it a point never to reply to Cox’s attitude on blacks. “How many have we got?”

  The half dozen agents in the duty room put out their cigarettes and put down their half-eaten sandwiches and gathered around, divvying up shifts for the night: so many for the embassies, so many to work the White House perimeter, so many for inside. Many of those, like Witjas, who’d walked in from Falls Church and Bethesda had brought sleeping bags and changes of clothing under the assumption that they’d be staying for as long as they had to. When things hadn’t straightened out by about noon, Cox had passed out pens and paper and told them to start writing reports about everything they’d observed on their way in, and these had been forwarded to the emergency command post in the State Department building.

  “You mind going back till midnight?” asked Cox, glancing up at Shango. “I’d feel safer if there was a fourth guy over there, and we’re gonna be spread thin.”

  “Fine with me,” said Shango. “Beats listenin’ to Witjas snore in the conference room.” And you talk in here.

  Witjas gave him the finger as he left the duty room and descended the stairs.

  No lights showed from the windows of the West Wing, but when Shango reached there—it must have been ten by then, though his watch had stopped at 9:17 that morning, like everyone else’s—he found the corridors and conference room still glowing with candlelight, stuffy after a day of no air-conditioning and the nightlong burning of dozens of small flames. When Shango came in, Agent Breckenridge was just showing Nina Diaz and Ron Guthrie out of McKay’s office—McKay’s press secretary and the White House chief of staff, part of the inner circle of advisers and friends. McKay had walked to the office door with them and looked like ten miles of bad road: shirt soaked with sweat, jacket and tie long gone, lines that most men didn’t develop until their sixties printed deep on his face. Past his shoulder Shango could see into the candlelit Oval Office, where chairs had been pulled up close to the desk and every surface was littered with papers and reports. Shango wondered whether any word had yet come in from the agents who were guarding McKay’s son up in Maine.

  There were still a dozen people sitting in the hall waiting to be seen, a couple of the big-name lobbyists from the oil companies and arms manufacturers, but mostly military: grim-looking young corporals with folders on their knees. Messengers.

  Not, by the look of them, bearers of any kind of good tidings.

  McKay turned his head and met Shango’s eye. And smiled—relieved?

  “Mr. Shango,” he said. He was always scrupulous about knowing the names of the men on the White House detail, and about calling people Mr., an odd little formality left over, Shango assumed, from his army days. The next instant a frown creased McKay’s forehead, “But you’re supposed to be off shift.”

  “Mr. Cox thought an extra man here might be helpful.” And he saw understanding change the President’s blue eyes.

  “As it happens,” said McKay, “I was thinking of sending a message asking you to come back for a few minutes. Steve,” he turned to where Steve Czernas, his deputy chief of staff, sat in the chair closest to the office door. “Mr. Breckenridge, if you’ll excuse us, please.”

  Breckenridge—one of the older men on White House detail, thin and tough and very silent—glanced at Shango and stepped out into the corridor to let Shango and Czernas pass him and go on into the office. McKay shut the door.

  “Mr. Shango,” he said, “I understand you scored at the top of your class in the training center.”

  “Not in all areas, sir,” said Shango, hands folded before him. He was a little rumpled and tired, but with his tie tied and jacket on he still looked more businesslike than the Commander in Chief. “But I was in the top five percent, yes, sir.”

  McKay smiled. “What you scored tops in was survival and escape and evasion.”

  “I grew up black in the Deep South, sir.”

  McKay grinned.

  “I’m going to ask Mr. Richter—or Mr. Cox, if Mr. Richter hasn’t come in yet—if he would second you to special duty. Would you be willing to undertake that?”

  “Of course, sir.” Shango felt a slight prickling of his scalp and thought, Here it is. What he’s known all along today that no one else has known.

  He glanced at Czernas. Like Shango, he was still neat, Yale tie knotted, navy blazer unrumpled, chin smooth as Pamela Anderson’s tit, and yet, beneath his almost dandyish sleekness, he had the elastic, broad-shouldered fitness of a young man who works out diligently. He’d often been on those long road rides, zooming out ahead while McKay stayed obediently back with the Secret Service boys.

  “This isn’t anything I’d ask of anyone if it weren’t an emergency,” McKay went on, and for an instant Shango could see him, thirty years younger, huddled in cammies by firelight in some Southeast Asian base camp, sizing up who to send out on patrol. “Jerri Bilmer was supposed to come into Dulles this morning, with some papers and possibly film, that could hold the key to what happened today.”

  Bilmer. Shango remembered the way McKay had kept his cell phone beside him that morning, the way he’d sat tense on the exercycle seat, conscious of it, listening for it. Recalled, too, McKay talking to Bilmer at that garden party last month, just before Bilmer went on vacation.

  “When was her flight due in?” asked Czernas, and McKay’s face seemed to settle a little in the wavering candlelight.

  “9:20,” he said.

  The glance that went around was almost audible. Oh, fuck.

  “She’s wearing black leggings, black sneakers and a red sequinned sweatshirt. She’ll have a black purse with her and some kind of travel bag.” McKay took a deep breath. “Find her. Get her here. If you can’t find her alive . . .” And there was a hesitation, an understanding among them of what they might have to do if her plane hadn’t touched down by 9:17. “Bring her purse and her luggage. This is vital. This is . . . this is to vital what the Nagasaki blast was to a damp sparkler. Understand?”

  Shango thought, Oh, shit. His uncle had been one of the cops to clean up the wreckage after a Delta flight had come down on a New Orleans housing project in the seventies.

  “About a month ago,” the President went on, “I heard a rumor that what I’d been told was a minor project of energy research called Source was receiving clandestine sums from both the Department of Defense and the CIA—”

  Czernas opened his mouth, glanced sidelong at Shango, then back to McKay, with Aren’t there too many people in this room? written all over his handsome young face. McKay’s eyes met his, long and steadily, then he continued deliberately, “far more than any minor research installation should have been getting. I coul
dn’t get a straight story out of either DoD or CIA, and in fact I got substantially different stories from each person I talked to. I still don’t know if they thought what they told me was the truth. The reports I’ve received over the past eighteen months—and the reports Source has been turning in since the Reagan administration—were all carefully tailored to make the project look like something other than it was.”

  Czernas looked over at Shango again, tightened his lips, and then asked, “And what was it, sir?” Shango said nothing and didn’t react. He understood already why McKay was telling them both this.

  “That was what Ms. Bilmer was trying to find out. We agreed that whatever day she came in, from whatever direction, she’d be on the 9:20 Houston flight, United Airlines 1046. She planned to change planes a couple of times, in case anyone was a little curious about which direction she came from. I don’t know her starting point, other than that it was somewhere in the West.”

  “It shouldn’t take more than a few hours to get to Dulles by bicycle,” said Czernas after a moment. “I biked here this morning. My backpack should hold enough water for the trip.”

  “I’ll lend you my backpack,” said McKay to Shango. “You can carry water.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Shango said quietly. “I’m not sure taking bikes is wise, at this point. There’s rioting down in Anacostia and in other places as well. There’s still no transportation as far as I’ve heard. Bikes may make us a target.”

  “Can we really afford the time it’ll take to walk?” replied Czernas. “Would the risk be that much greater, to justify the delay? We’ll both be armed.”

  McKay hesitated. “Speed is of the essence,” he said at last. “And even more than speed—getting back here with those papers. With that information. That’s why I’m sending both of you. I must get whatever it is she has. And I must get it soon.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Shango. Already the buildings had the faint smell of sewage, of plumbing that wouldn’t work, of water that wouldn’t come through pipes. First it’ll be water, thought Shango, and then it’ll be food, if something isn’t done. He knew the Army and the National Guard were already stockpiling supplies. That would cause further trouble.

  “I’ve written you an authorization, as Commander-in-Chief.”

  “That won’t cut any ice with Jerri Bilmer,” said the aide. “I mean, she’ll know us by sight, but she wouldn’t trust Jesus Christ if he showed her the holes in his hands. If some of the other services are involved in the cover-up, she may recognize us and vanish in the crowd. Is there anything we can give her, to let her know she can go with us?”

  Shango thought Czernas was referring to another document, but after a moment’s thought, McKay reached into the open collar of his sweat-stained shirt and drew out a little ball-link chain that still bore a slip of punch-printed tin.

  Shango had one like it, in a footlocker at his sister’s place. The sign of someone he used to be.

  McKay coiled it down into Czernas’ hand.

  “Mr. Shango,” he said, turning to the agent, “Czernas is in charge of this mission, but you’re both responsible for its accomplishment. If one or the other of you should not be able to complete this task, I charge the other one to complete it. My authorization will let you take whatever you need, do whatever you must.” And Shango saw in his eyes exactly his own thoughts about what had happened to every plane in the sky that morning. “But find her and the information. Bring them back.”

  “We’ll get them,” said Czernas. Then he grinned his boyish grin and added, “Heck, by tomorrow they might have got the cars running again, and this whole thing’ll be a snap.”

  “They won’t,” said McKay, and there was in his voice a note of sureness and sorrow that turned Shango’s heart icy with dread. “They won’t.”

  NEW YORK

  One hundred three point two. Shit.

  Cal shook down the thermometer, gazed at his sister. Her hair was plastered to her brow in thin strands, clung to the side of her face. She turned her head on the pillow with a bleary, fevered intensity. By the bedroom’s candlelight, she looked like some refugee child, fragile and very pale.

  “How’s the head?” he asked.

  “Light,” Tina whispered dreamily. “Like if I let go, I’d just float up and up.”

  When he and Colleen had entered the apartment, they had found Tina leaning against the window frame, staring out at the night as though the fight was still raging. He’d called her name several times before snaring her attention, and then she’d turned to them with an eerie slowness, seeming to summon herself back from a long distance.

  He had touched her face, felt an alarming heat. Then he’d gathered her in his arms, as he had so many times when she was little, and carried her to her room. In the gloom, his foot had found a heavy volume—the Nijinsky diary, fallen from the nightstand in the tremor. He had nudged it aside and set Tina softly on the bed, a feather.

  Colleen hadn’t said, “Maybe I should go.” She’d just gone to the kitchen, soaked a dish towel in water from an Evian bottle and brought it to him, along with the aspirin. Then she had withdrawn to the living room, silent, waiting.

  Cal shook the thermometer again, guided it toward Tina’s mouth. She groaned a protest. “Just one more time,” he said, “just to—”

  He stopped, startled, as he spied her hand resting atop the covers. In the moonlight it appeared bloodless, translucent, faint tracings of veins beneath the skin.

  Tina followed his gaze. “Looks like I’m turning into one of those fish you can see through,” she murmured, but he could hear the fear beneath.

  Tightness gripped his chest, and he had the wild thought that vampires had gotten to her, drained her. He pushed it away, held the thermometer before her mouth. “Just to be sure.”

  She nodded this time and took it.

  “Any better?” asked Colleen, when Cal emerged from his sister’s bedroom. He raised his eyes, and his face in the candlelight seemed older than it was downtown this morning, when he was just another fresh-faced life-support system for an Armani. Not that his suit was an Armani, she thought, looking around at the threadbare apartment, the shelves of law books, the fencing trophies treasured on a shelf. CALVIN GRIFFIN, they said. CLASS OF 1992. HURLEY HIGH SCHOOL.

  Where the fuck was Hurley?

  “Worse,” he said, and his eyes looked old and weary.

  She remembered the tone in his voice when he’d said, My sister, on the street that morning. I take care of her.

  Yet he’d stopped to ask if she, Colleen, needed help. If she was okay.

  She could see the tremor of his hand as he set the thermometer down on the edge of the pass-through into the kitchen. She wanted to put an arm around his shoulders and tell him, She’ll be all right, but that might be bullshit. For all she knew, the poor kid might have the plague.

  And hanging around here wasn’t exactly the greatest health move for her, either. She held no special immunity from whatever the hell it was.

  But surprisingly, this didn’t worry her. She felt calm here, comforted even, although she couldn’t have said why.

  Cal Griffin stood still, looking bleakly at her—no, beyond her, to nothing at all. She said, “Try the phone.”

  “It’s dead.” So was his voice, his eyes.

  “Try it.”

  He opened his mouth to snap but saw her point—things could come back on at any time—and picked up the receiver. Even as she watched him try not to smash it against the wall—of course it was dead as stone—Colleen realized she’d been prepared to go over and pick up the phone herself, assuming he’d simply say, Oh, fuck off, it’s dead, why bother. Like Rory did. She’d almost forgotten that there were people willing to listen to her. Willing to change their minds or their attitudes.

  I’ve been around Rory too long.

  She looked at the framed photos on the wall: a slim, solemn, fair-haired boy with worried eyes, an ethereal slip of a dark-haired girl, on a shabby front porch
with a tired-looking woman. That was the only photo that contained Mom. The rest were just Sister and Young Mr. Suit: college graduation, him getting another fencing trophy, Sis in ballet tights, a series of recitals, a brittle clipping from some local paper, with her looking so innocent and fragile it made your throat hurt—all the prettiness Colleen had envied as a girl, without the spite that the pretty girls so often showed.

  And another, just the two of them, hand in hand.

  “I have to get her to a hospital,” said Cal. “She’s burning up.”

  Colleen glanced back at him. Voices carried up to the fourth-floor window. Looters had returned to Patel’s, picking over the goods scattered on the sidewalk and on the street.

  “Roosevelt’s the closest.” Not knowing how to speak of comfort, Colleen took refuge in the practical, which was always the best course anyway, she thought. “Fifty-ninth and Tenth. You got something to carry her in?”

  She saw the young man flip through half a dozen possibilities in a second, picking them up and discarding them like her dad checking out bolts of different sizes, looking for one that fit.

  “There’s grocery carts at Patel’s,” he said.

  Colleen nodded. Close, and the looters wouldn’t be fighting over them—not yet, anyway.

  Cal drew a deep breath, made a smile and held out his hand to her. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you more than I can say.” And there was that brisk lawyer tone in his voice that added, We’re done here.

  I won’t ask you for anything else.

  “I’ll get the cart,” said Colleen, ignoring him. “Can you get her down the stairs?”

  Cal closed his eyes briefly. Colleen could see the relief on his face, that he wouldn’t have to do this alone. He said, “Thank you,” again, the voice of a friend.

  WEST VIRGINIA

  “There is nothing unsafe about those tunnels!” Norman Mullein pitched his voice to carry over the voices of the men and women crowding the wet gravel yard between the office and the pithead. “There hasn’t been a flood, there wasn’t a cave-in. . . .”