PART TWO
All Problems are Personal
21
Sunday, June 12th
Washington, D.C.
At home, Jay came out of VR, took a deep breath, and removed his headset and gloves. It had been a milk run, a visit to a library, and no matter how skilled you were in creating scenarios, sooner or later, reading a pile of material came down to reading a pile of material.
He had all he could find on Dr. Patrick Morrison, and while he had skimmed it as it was being copied, he hadn’t begun to take it all in. From what he’d gleaned so far, the guy was legit enough. Degrees, work experience, marriages, the usual living-life stuff. No trouble with the law, no beefs at work, pretty much Mr. Dull N. Boring right down the line.
The only blot on an otherwise white-bread career was at the job he’d had before going to work for HAARP. He’d been doing some kind of behavioral modification experiments on chimps, working with extremely low-frequency radiation, a post-doc research project at Johns Hopkins, and it had apparently petered out. He failed to get the results for which he had been looking. His grant, as the report mildly and politely put it, had not been renewed, and he’d been out of a job.
A small red flag went up in Jay’s mind, but when he thought about it, it wasn’t that big a deal. Yeah, the guy was into ELF stuff, but that’s what a lot of HAARP was about. If you were looking for a plumber, you didn’t hire a cabdriver, now did you?
“All work and no play make Jay a dull boy,” Soji said.
He smiled up at her. She stood there in a bathrobe. “Look who’s talking. You’ve been so deep into the web I haven’t been able to see anything but your back for days.”
“Want to see something else?” She undid the bathrobe and held it open.
“Oh, mama! Come here!”
Before she could move, however, the phone played the opening strains of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Unfortunately, his phone was programmed so it played that particular tune only if the call was IDed as coming from Net Force HQ or Alex Michaels’s virgil.
“Shit,” he said.
Soji closed her robe and belted it shut. “He who hesitates stays horny,” she said.
“Hey, Boss,” Jay said.
“Better get to the office, Jay,” Michaels said. “There’s been another case of collective madness.”
“In China?”
“No,” Michaels said. His voice was grim. “Closer than that.”
Sunday, June 12th
Portland, Oregon
John Howard watched as his son came up to make his throw. The boy stopped, rubbed his fingers back and forth, and allowed some glittery dust to fall to check wind direction. He held a stopwatch in one hand and his boomerang in the other. The judges waved Tyrone into the circle.
Howard felt more tense than he’d thought he would. It was a big deal to Tyrone, of course, but it was just a game, after all. No reason to be digging his fingernails into his palms.
Off to one side and behind Tyrone, Little Nadine stood, waiting for her turn to compete. She was three contestants behind Tyrone, so she’d know what time she had to beat. So far, the times hadn’t been very good, according to Tyrone, and both kids had done better in practice.
The judge nearest the circle held up his hand in a halt sign, then called another judge over for some kind of consultation.
“Come on, come on!” Howard said. “Let the boy throw before his arm gets cold!”
Next to him, his wife said, “A*shole.”
He looked at her. “You talkin’ to me?”
“Not particularly, I was referring to the judge, but if the shoe fits ...”
That pissed him off. What was she on the rag about now? He hadn’t done anything. He glared at her. She glared right back.
Tyrone stood there for another few seconds, then walked to where the judges were. Howard couldn’t hear what his boy had to say, but apparently the judges really didn’t like it.
The head judge reached out and slapped Tyrone upside the head.
“F*ck!” Howard yelled. “You see that? He hit our son!” Even as he spoke, Howard ran toward Tyrone and the judges.
The second judge must have figured the slap was rude, because he hauled off and punched the head judge square in the mouth, knocking the man down. Certainly this was justice, but that irritated Howard even more.
“Leave him!” Howard yelled as he ran. “That bastard is mine!”
Tyrone stepped in and delivered a solid kick to the fallen judge’s ribs. It sounded like somebody dropping a watermelon, thoo-wock!
Even as he drew near to the trio, Howard was aware of noises coming up the hill: horns honked, metal crashed into metal. He slid to a stop as the second judge spun to face him.
“Get off the circle!” the man screamed. “You can’t be here!”
“Oh, yeah?” Howard said. “Hey, pal, I’m already here! What are you gonna do about it?”
Tyrone gave the fallen judge another kick. Not as good as the first one; it had a flatter sound. Weak, son, weak.
The second judge threw a haymaker at Howard, who ducked it, came up, launched a fast left hook to the face, then a right cross to the chin, bap-bap! That straightened the sucker out like popping a shoe shine cloth. The guy sailed backward and to the ground. Get off that, a*shole!
The judge Tyrone was kicking got to his feet and lurched at the boy, but before Howard could get there, both Nadines arrived. His wife kneed the guy in the crotch as Little Nadine latched onto his arm and sank her teeth into his shoulder.
Irritated, Howard moved toward them. This was his business to take care of, he didn’t need the goddamned women getting in the goddamned way—!
A car came across the field, lights on and horn honking, a big, powder-blue Cadillac. It plowed into a group of five men who stood there giving the driver the finger. The men flew like dolls in all directions as the driver gunned the engine.
Not real smart to shoot the bird at a man coming at you in a car at speed.
“Eat shit and die!” the driver screamed. Then he started to laugh.
Four or five other people attacked the Caddy, slamming their fists and feet at it. The driver spun a donut in the grass, still cackling madly.
Something wrong here, Howard thought. He shook his head, then looked at the man he had just decked. What was he doing?
He looked down the hill and saw a dozen people fighting. One of them was a policeman. The cop pulled his gun, and a quick succession of shots—pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! —echoed up the hill. Gunshot victims fell, and added more screams to the din.
Dazed, Howard looked up the hill. There were people there, too, but they weren’t fighting; they were watching, staring in surprise.
Howard’s thoughts were fogged with rage, but something was trying to make its way through the anger: This was a bad place. Down the hill it was worse, but up the hill, it was better. Therefore ...
“Come on!” he yelled to his family. “We have to get up the hill!”
“F*ck off!” Tyrone yelled back.
Little Nadine released her hold on the judge, who was screaming in pain. She stared at Howard. “What is going on?” she said, her voice high and frightened.
“I don’t know. Gas, maybe. We’ve got to get out of here. Help me.”
His wife kneed the judge in the nuts again. The man gurgled in agony. Howard grabbed her, pulled her off.
“Leave me alone! He hit my son!”
Howard jerked her backward. “Tyrone!”
The boy turned, and the mask of primal rage on his face slipped a little. He raised his eyebrows. “Dad?”
“Up the hill, son, up the hill. Go, go!”
Tyrone nodded. Little Nadine grabbed his hand and they started running.
Howard had to pin Nadine’s arms to her side and he half carried, half dragged her away from the meadow. She kicked and screamed at him for a hundred meters before she stopped. She was a lot stronger than he’d realized.
Finally, when they were two hundred meters away, Nadine came back. “J-John? What—?”
“I don’t know, hon. But whatever it is, the farther away we get, the better. Come on.”
They caught up to the children, and the four of them kept moving. Howard looked back as they ran. The Cadillac was lying on its side, and a mob had the driver out and on the ground, kicking him. He was a dead man. More gunshots echoed from farther below. Horns honked. Cars crashed. People screamed in voices full of incoherent fury. This beautiful park, what the locals like to call God’s country, had gone mad.
It was the Devil’s land, now.
Howard reached for his virgil. Who to call? The local cops were down there shooting people. They needed help, and they needed it bad.
Sunday, June 12th
Quantico, Virginia
Toni had come with him this time, and he was glad to have her here. Along with Toni was Jay Gridley. It was seven P.M. on a Sunday, but they wouldn’t be going home tonight.
“All right, here is what we have so far,” Michaels said. “It’s still kind of sketchy. Late this afternoon, people inside what appears to be a rough circle ten miles across and centered in the Westmoreland area of Portland, Oregon, went nuts. So far, there are sixty-seven confirmed deaths—murders, self-defense, traffic and freak accidents. There have been hundreds of people hurt bad enough to require hospitalization, and thousands more lesser injuries. Whatever caused it seems to have stopped, but the city is in chaos. The numbers of dead and injured keep climbing.”
“Lord, Lord. How is General Howard?” Jay asked.
Howard had been the one who’d called it in. He’d gotten hold of the National Guard, then Michaels.
“He and his family are fine. They were apparently right at the outmost edge of the phenomenon’s effect. A couple hundred meters closer in, and they’d have been in a lot more trouble. What have you got for me?”
Jay said, “If we assume this is coming from some very powerful broadcast station, then it’s a matter of figuring out which one, and who is running it. I played a hunch and put in a call to HAARP, talked to a guard there. They are supposedly on hiatus, except for some calibration tests.”
“That’s what Morrison told me,” Michaels said.
“Well, Morrison is up there right now running one of these tests. And guess what—according to the guard’s logs, he was running other ’calibrations’ on the same days those two villages in China went bonkers.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. Awful coincidental, ain’t it?”
“Toni? What do you think?”
“I think maybe you ought pick up this Dr. Morrison for a serious chat.”
Michaels nodded. “I’ll get a federal warrant and some marshals on the way.”
“You don’t want to toss this one over the fence to the mainline feebs?” Jay said.
“Not yet,” Michaels said. “This looks like our mess. We should clean it up on our own if we can.”
Maybe Morrison wasn’t involved with this, but given the situation in Portland, they couldn’t afford to take the chance. The next incident might happen anywhere—New York, Chicago, even Washington, D.C. While the thought of senators and congressmen beating each other to bloody pulps sounded fine as a joke punch line, the reality of it was different.
Getting a warrant would be easy enough, and there were probably federal marshals somewhere in Alaska who could serve it. And while he was at it, he would give General Howard a call. After his personal experience, John might like to go along to have a few words with Morrison himself. In his position, Michaels knew he would.