Magic Time Read online

  IN THE AIR

  Nobody asked her questions at the car rental return.

  Nobody asked her questions at check-in.

  Nobody asked her questions at security.

  (Am I really going to get away with this?)

  It was part of Jerri Bilmer’s job to look unconcerned, to blend in with other caffeine-deprived morning travelers jostling along the concourse. To stand in line in the Kigali airport or at a bus stop in Baghdad without even a quickening of breath while RPF or Republican Guard came around checking papers and ransacking luggage at random. To appear, not innocent—they always go for those who look innocent—but simply as part of the background. To appear like nothing, no one, with microdots or little rolls of fiche burning holes in her purse strap or shoes.

  Thinking about something else helped.

  But this wasn’t like Kigali or Baghdad or Port Sudan. For the first time since she was a recruit, Bilmer felt a skittery sense of being out of control, of waiting for something to happen and not knowing what the hell it would be.

  Bilmer floated restlessly, uneasily in the vicinity of the gate without sitting down, listening for boarding, watching the standbys. Pretending to look at magazines, books, candies, souvenir-covered wagons and shot glasses inscribed with the Royals’ logo. Straining all her senses, without the slightest idea what she was looking for.

  She didn’t wear the sunglasses that so many of her colleagues favored—I mean, how obvious can you be?—so it was more difficult to scan the concourse around her, but she saw no threat.

  Or at least, saw nobody who looked like Russian mafia or Serbian nationals.

  But what would this threat look like?

  Stay cool. Stay cool and you can get away with anything.

  Jetway.

  Boarding pass.

  Seat 12-A.

  If the plane should lose cabin pressure during flight, these oxygen masks will drop down. . . .

  One of the most useful talents in an agent, some friend in the department had told her once, is the ability not to sweat. Taking her seat, she mentally tagged the possibles, the ones to watch out for: the guy in the green T-shirt with the computer, maybe. Not your typical businessman. Or maybe one of the businessmen with laptops? Clones of one another, easy disguise. The old dude with the cane, maybe. Had she seen that woman with the backpack before?

  Follow the rules and be ready, she thought. Be ready for anything.

  Takeoff. Square brown fields with the green circles of center-fed automatic watering equipment. Gray-white roads and cars like hurrying bugs. Coffee service.

  At least lifting off from Basra or Beirut you could exhale and lean back and think, safe. (Well, if you weren’t flying Aeroflot anyway.) Could these people get her at Dulles? On the taxi into D.C.? McKay said he’d send someone to pick her up if she wanted, and she’d told him what she’d wear, but she had no intention of doing so. Not after what she’d seen at the Source.

  She angled her foot so her toe was always in contact with her purse under the seat ahead of her and tried to look interested in the copy of People she’d bought, while the men in suits read their reports or worked on their laptop computers and the guy in the green T-shirt got out his Powerbook and started to play hearts.

  For all his reputation as an idealist, Stuart McKay was a President who worked well with Congress, who knew the shortcuts and could get things done in a hurry. Bilmer had heard him described as a mixer, a pourer of oil on troubled waters, or, if you listened to his enemies, a compromiser. And he’ll need it, thought Bilmer. He’ll need to pull all the strings, to call in all the favors, he can, if he’s going to cut off Sanrio’s power before . . .

  Before what?

  It scared her, that she didn’t quite know. Nor had she any clear idea of what McKay might be able to do against the little group of physicists in their South Dakota fastness. Call them back to Washington on a pretext and arrest them at the airport? Cut off the electricity to the installation in the Black Hills? Nuke the place before they got their field, or whatever they called it, into place?

  She settled back in her seat and turned pages, pretending to read.

  The old dude with the cane fell asleep, or pretended to. The broad with the backpack read a book. What else was in the backpack? The Mississippi River below, then the Ohio, then the Appalachians. Stroller Mom in the seat behind Bilmer read The Velveteen Rabbit to one child—the more you love and are loved, the more real you become—while another squalled endlessly, peevishly. A man two rows in front of Bilmer kept up a loud-voiced catalogue of the Hollywood celebrities with whom he’d worked, to the intermittent gasped punctuation of a sweet female voice.

  Nothing.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the captain’s voice from the cockpit, “we’re starting our descent into Dulles International Airport. The time in Washington is approximately 9:17, eastern daylight time. Your flight crew will be coming by to collect cups and napkins. Please bring your seats and your tray tables back to full upright and locked position.”

  The plane tilted, banked. Below, the green-dotted sprawl of streets, brick houses, parks, baseball diamonds. The glitter of water of the Chesapeake country. To the west the low green ripple of the Alleghenies, and beyond them . . .

  “Hey,” said Bilmer’s seat mate, sitting up and looking past her at the windows. “What’s that light in the sky?”

  Chapter Seven

  NEW YORK—9:13 A.M. EDT

  “He’s breathing fire,” Janice Fishman warned from her desk as Cal Griffin pushed through the double doors into the lobby of Stern, Ledding and Bowen.

  The secretaries and mailroom boys and paralegals were chattering on their headsets, scribbling notes, rushing about under herniating weights of paper. Cal dodged them, slid up to the closed conference room doors, gleaming like twin coffin lids. Through the glass on either side he could see the meeting well under way; Ed Ledding and Peter Chomsky and Anita La Bonte were there, as well as the other associates— with one notable exception—silent as stone heads around the big table. The familiar black-suited figure strode up and down like the predator he was, holding forth, his words cloaked to silence by the glass, his back momentarily to Cal.

  Cal’s fingertips brushed the heavy wooden doors and paused. He wanted to be calm, but his heart was jackhammering; his brow and upper lip glistened with sweat. Curiously, a phrase drifted into his mind, one that at first he couldn’t place. Then the memory came of their mother reading by Tina’s bedside; he heard it, muffled and musical, through the walls of their wind-whipped home.

  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else . . .

  Cal steadied himself, eased the doors open and stepped through.

  “—cells working in harmony, you get a hummingbird, an orchid, a humpback whale.” Stern was speaking quietly, as he always did when most dangerous. “In mutiny and rebellion, all you get is cancer.”

  The others had spied Cal and tensed. Sensing this, Stern turned to face him. “Ah, Mr. Griffin. Word of your morning’s handiwork hath preceded you. Should we give you a ticker-tape parade? Perhaps a party with clowns?”

  Indignation flared in Cal; he opened his mouth to speak. But Stern raised a preemptive finger. “No. Not a word.” He closed, glowering with eyes impenetrable as mirrored shades. “This is not Woodstock. I am not Mother Teresa. So the only relevant issue is—”

  His words cut off as the tremor hit the room, like the flat of an immense hand smacking the building. The walls shook violently; the floor lurched. Cal staggered, barely managed to keep standing as he clutched the table and felt something pass through him like a great wind. Stern grasped the wall for support. Bunky Hegland and Seth Harris tumbled out of their chairs, amid a babble of shrieks and gasps. The overhead fixtures swayed, and the lights went out, plunging the room into darkness.

  Cal shouted, “The table! Get under the table!” En masse, they dove beneath the thick slab—all save Ster
n, who stood frozen by the wall. Out of the corner of his eye, Cal thought he saw a blue light surge about Stern, an eruption that flared and was gone. But he couldn’t swear to it; his eyes were still phosphor-flashing from the sudden shift of light to dark.

  The tremor continued, rose in rhythmic, undulating vibrations, the walls swaying and groaning, the floor bucking. Distantly, Cal heard glass breaking, the thud and clatter of objects, impacts dull and splintering. Huddled under the table, he felt the warmth of bodies mashed against him, the rise and fall of rapid, shallow breath. There were no screams now, only grunts with each concussion, wordless murmurs of incomprehension, the need for it to stop.

  Cal found that he had his arms draped over two others, he couldn’t tell whom, instinctively sheltering them. The intimacy of the dark, the clamor, the proximity of bodies all held an echo, a resonance of his dream.

  But it was real. As the blood pulsed in his ears, his bones and flesh and teeth shuddering, all he could think of was his sister.

  The shaking began to subside, the cacophony of distant sounds racheted down. The voices about Cal whirled up in sharp whispers, collided, broke upon each other. “Earthquake, my god—” “In Manhattan?” “Explosive device—” “Big gas main over in, my cousin—” “Vertical fault lines, right under—”

  The creaking of the overhead fixtures slowed, the glass tubes cooling, extinguished. Cal crawled out from under the table, motioning the others. “Come on.”

  They followed, as he shoved open the big doors and rushed out into the bullpen. It was brighter here, daylight filtering from the open doorways of Ledding’s and Bowen’s suites. Paralegals and secretaries were helping each other up, dim shambling forms in the gloom. Somewhere a man or woman—impossible to tell—was sobbing quietly.

  Cal grabbed up a desk phone, held the receiver to his ear—dead.

  “Who’s got a cell phone?” he shouted.

  “Here!” Janice Fishman handed off her Nokia, and Cal punched in the number of St. Augustine, hit send. Nothing.

  “Where the hell are the emergency lights?” That was Paul Cajero, panic fracturing his voice.

  Cal cast about the room, made out the misty shapes of Bob Williams Jr. and Chris Black holding cell phones to their ears, shaking them ineffectually. By now, Anita La Bonte had fished a portable radio from her desk, and Paul Leonard had retrieved a flashlight from the utility cabinet. Inexplicably, they weren’t working either.

  Cal felt a vise tighten around his heart. He had to get onto the street, see how widespread this was, get to a working phone, if there was one, make sure Tina . . .

  A soft moan issued from the conference room. Cal turned to it. Through the open doors, he saw the figure within, slumped against a wall, alone.

  Cal entered and drew near. In the murky light from the doorway, he could see Stern sitting motionless on the floor, face averted. Stern grew aware of him, angled his head slightly, eyes nearly closed.

  “Do you need a hand up?” Cal asked. The sight of Stern so still, emptied of his hectic, decisive energy, shook him.

  “No,” Stern said languidly, indifferent. Shock? Cal couldn’t see any obvious injuries, but that meant nothing. Stern grimaced, shielded his eyes from the dim light.

  “Hey, everybody! Look!” Barbara Claman’s Marlboro rasp sang out from the common room. Stern turned his head away dismissively. Cal withdrew.

  He found the rest of the staff massed with Barbara by the window in Russ Bowen’s suite, peering down, strangely subdued. He squeezed through them, squinted at the daylight.

  On the street far below, and on all the streets as far as the eye could see, the cars, trucks, cabs and buses were still. Tiny figures emerged from pygmy vehicles, lifted hoods, stood stunned and disbelieving. “They’re not working either,” Janice muttered incredulously, needlessly. Her voice held awe, and fear.

  Cal let out a long breath. His eyes lifted to the heavens— and he froze. “Oh, my God,” he whispered.

  The others turned to him, saw the dawning horror on his face.

  The objects looked almost like toys, so many miles distant, and they were lovely, really, glinting in the sun, all twisting and angling downward.

  “The planes,” Cal said. “They’re falling out of the sky.”

  WEST VIRGINIA—9:17 A.M. EDT

  Fred felt it grab him at the same instant every machine in Bob’s room went dark.

  There wasn’t even the steady flamenco of alarms that you saw in TV movies when the hero’s wife or mother or best friend went into seizure in the emergency room. Just no lights, no readouts. Even the backup batteries had gone dark. And Bob’s mind, screaming, screaming for help . . .

  Bob, I’ve got you! Fred caught him, seized him, reached out into the dark into which he was falling and held on, even as he felt the horrible cold dragging at him. . . .

  They were children again; Bob had fallen into Cherry Creek during the floods of ’63, racing current ripping him away. Fred had managed to grab him, hook his own arm around the remains of the old dock, while the cold water hammered him and icy numbness bored deeper and deeper into his flesh.

  I won’t let you go! I won’t let you go!

  And the child-Bob pressed into his chest, clutched at his arm with nerveless fingers. He couldn’t breathe or think. He only knew that he couldn’t let go.

  Roaring in his ears, in his mind. Weightless swinging over a void, and that terrible, ghastly dragging at him, drawing him back to the Source. Voices screaming, thunder in his brain: Sanrio, Wu, Pollard. Come back here! Come back! We need you . . .!

  Bob screaming his name.

  He’d deserted Bob once before. He would not do it again.

  Fred reached out, gathered everything the Source surrounded him with, all that power, all that light, and poured it into Bob’s still heart and still lungs and dying bloodstream and brain. I won’t let you go!

  And in his ears and heart and brain and soul, the world screamed.

  Roof fall, thought Hank in a second of blind, hideous panic. Floor heave. Explosion. His hands fumbled automatically at the Self-Contained Self-Rescuer—the respirator—hanging at his belt.

  “Fuck a duck!” howled Sonny Grimes from the darkness behind him, and for some reason the man’s yowl of protest steadied Hank, centered him. As soon as he yanked the SCSR’s strap tight, he hit the levers of the shearer, though the thing had ground to an instant, shuddering halt already.

  Hollow in the respirator’s filters, Gordy Flue’s voice said, “C’mon, Sonny, where you gonna get a duck down here?”

  And Ryan, “What happened to the headlamps?”

  Silence. A million tons of mountain and darkness deep as the end of the world.

  Hands shaking, Hank fumbled the flashlight from his pocket. He heard something clatter, small and metallic on the floor, and Gordy cursed. He guessed the others were doing the same.

  He switched over the toggle, and he might as well have flipped a tiddly-wink for all the light it summoned. “Son-of-a-bitch batteries,” said Roop McDonough as Hank shook his own flashlight, took the fresh batteries from his pocket, tried again.

  Zip.

  Hank felt himself trembling, sweat on his face and bile in his mouth. The smell of coal dust was thick in his nostrils, his lungs. Every man at the face knew that a flame here could be the last light any of them would ever see. Aftershocks, he thought. Wasn’t that what happened in California and Japan? The earth calmed down and then went on shaking, on and off, for days?

  Ryan Hanson spoke again. “How come all the helmet lights went out?”

  “Everybody okay?” Hank called into the blackness, and Al’s voice and Tim’s echoed in response. Hank hit the toggle on his radio and got nothing—no surprise there. By the stillness of the air he knew the vent fans had quit working, too. “Anybody hurt?”

  “Yeah, I slipped in it when I pissed my pants.” Gordy again, and the unwilling laugh it got was like the breaking of an iron band around Hank’s throat.

 
“What happened to the batteries?” asked Bartolo. His voice was moving. He was feeling his way along the wall, Hank guessed, toward the tunnel that led back to the main.

  “Coulda been some kind of electronic pulse,” said Ryan. His voice struggled to retain its calm before his seniors. “Like they say a nuclear attack would cause.”

  “Nuclear attack?” Panic edged Roop’s words. “You think . . . ?”

  “Fuck, who’d drop a bomb on West Virginia?” cut in Grimes, exasperation further chipping at the terror, breaking it up like a boulder into manageable chunks.

  “Could be something like the same thing, I meant,” Ryan amended hastily. “You know, that would put out electronic equipment.”

  “A mile down?”

  “A battery and a bulb ain’t exactly what you call ‘electronic equipment,’ butthead.”

  “Hey!” Hank pocketed his useless light. “Doesn’t matter what put them out. They’re out. We’ll find out what happened when things get working again. Everybody get to a wall and work your way around to the entrance of the main. Let’s get back to the elevator and maybe find some lights that work.”

  Nobody said what everybody was thinking: What if there was a roof fall in the main?

  If there was, they’d find out soon enough.

  Stumbling and slipping on the rolling masses of shale and coal, Hank worked his way back along the face, the curved gouges in the rock sharp and rough under his fingers. In the darkness the men kept up a banter, cursing or making jokes to cover their fear (“Hey, let’s play Marco Polo!” “Fuck you, Gordy”) and Hank marveled again at their capacity to deal with terror, emergency, God knew what.

  We’re not dead. We can deal with the next ten minutes.

  “Got here,” called out Tim, presumably from the entrance.

  Very suddenly, Hank’s hand encountered damp, slightly greasy cloth and the warmth of a shoulder. “That you, Tim?” He could have hugged the man.