Death Dream (53 page)

Vickie nodded.

Deadly earnest, Smith said, "Control the information input to the President and you control the President. Every powerful chief of staff knew that: Eisenhower's chief, Sherman Adams; Nixon's Ehrlichman; Bush's Sununu—they all made certain that the only access to the president was through them."

"But they all got fired, eventually, didn't they?"

"That's the beauty of it. I'll be strictly behind the scenes. The media won't even know I exist. They won't know a thing about the VR system. I'll just be an assistant to the guy who has to take the heat."

"The power behind the throne."

"Right on! And it doesn't matter if The Man gets re-elected or not. I'll be just one of the administrative staff guys who stays there no matter who's in office. Part of the faceless bureaucracy. With you and a couple of other people I know, we can run the works!"

"A few other people?"

"I mean," he went on, ignoring her question, "this country needs good, solid, reliable government. But what've we got? One party gets in and tries to do its thing, the other party works its ass off to block everything until they get their own guy into the White House. That's got to stop!"

"And you're going to put an end to that?" Vickie murmured.

"Hell yes! We're going to give this country good government, get the job done, put this nation back on the road to greatness."

"With virtual reality."

He nodded grimly. "First the White House. Once the cabinet secretaries find out how the President gets so sharp, they'll all want access to a similar VR system. Then the clucks in the Congress will want it, too. We'll get them all, and they'll all see the world the way we want them to see it."

"You'll be running the entire government," Vickie said, surprised that the thought appealed to her.

"It's this drug business, Vic," he said earnestly. "It's destroying our children; it's destroying the fabric of our society, for Lord's sake! We've got to stop them."

"Them?"

"The dealers. The pushers. Organized crime. The whole damnable drug cartel. I mean, we've got the armed forces: It's time to use them! Get the President to declare a national emergency. Suspend all these damned civil rights laws, temporarily. It's been done before. Lincoln did it, and look what a saint he's thought to be!"

"I don't understand," Vickie said.

"The President can activate the National Guard. With them and the regular Army we can go into the cities, rout out the pushers and dealers and all those other crooks and pimps. Clean 'em all out! And their goddamned crooked lawyers, too! Put 'em all behind barbed wire."

Vickie felt almost breathless. "Chuck, that's—that's not possible. Is it?"

"Somebody's got to do it, sooner or later. Somebody's got to." Hunching forward on the loveseat, unconsciously lowering his voice, Smith said, "There's a small group of real Americans who want to set things right. We want to make this government work. Work the right way."

Her eyes widening, Vickie gasped, "You want to take over the government?"

Smith grinned at her. "That's the beauty part of it, Vic. We don't have to do anything so old-fashioned. With VR we don't have to take over the government. But we can run it!"

"Run it?"

"Control the information input, remember? We start with the White House. Put in a VR system in time to shape the President's State of the Union message. Get him to see things the way we want him to see them."

"Through VR."

"Right on. VR for the White House staff. VR for the Oval Office. Pretty soon the cabinet officers are going to want their own VR systems. So we start to control them. Then the Congress. A small group of us is going to take over the decision-making process in Washington. And that group includes you, Vickie. You're part of this."

"I am?"

"You are now. The guy who's coming down here, Hal Perry, he's with the Security Advisor's staff. He's a key man in our group. There's only a handful of us, but we're positioned in the most influential spots in the White House."

"You really intend to run the White House?"

"The whole government, Vickie. The whole god-damned mother-loving shebang. And you're part of it. You're going to be the most powerful woman in the country, Vickie. The most powerful woman in the world!"

Nodding, Vickie saw a vision of herself in the White House. But the vision disappeared almost instantly.

"Jace," she said.

"What about him?" asked Smith.

"How are we going to control him? You can't trust him to keep his mouth shut."

Smith smiled tightly at her. "That's going to be your problem. You're our liaison with the technical types."

"Thanks a lot!"

His smile widened into a toothy grin. "Don't worry. Jace'll be okay as long as we give him toys to play with. I told him he can have anything he wants in the way of hardware and he seems happy as a pig in shit."

"For now," Vickie said. "But I wonder how long he'll stay happy. And under control."

"As long as we need him." Then Smith's grin vanished. "Once he's finished this first job, of course, we could get rid of him if we have to."

Vickie nodded again, slowly, but said, "It would be better to keep him. He's tremendously creative."

"Sure," said Smith easily. "As long as he's useful. And under control."

"I feel like a Kamikaze pilot," Dan muttered as he stood at the breezeway door, keys in hand.

"You can do it, Tiger," Susan encouraged him.

"Yeah." He kissed her tightly and then went out through the door toward his Honda, a slightly-built man in a short-sleeved shirt and beltless gray slacks, navy blue sports jacket slung over one arm, heading for a showdown with his best friend and his boss.

Susan's heart went out to him. She knew he would rather be a million miles away from this, yet he was finally marching out there to face Jace and Muncrief. But Dan did not look like a soldier heading into battle or a flyer going off to attack the enemy. To Susan he looked more like a grimly determined man heading toward a suicide mission.

CHAPTER 41

All the way to the office Dan kept muttering to himself, "Stand up to him. Don't let him evade the issue. Come right out with it and don't let up until he's told you everything."

Yet he remembered the shootout simulation. Jace gunned me down. He killed me. He could do it again. I've got to keep him out of the VR chamber and pin him down to reality. The real world. I've got to keep him in the real world and make him tell me what he's done. That was going to be tough enough, he knew. But he also dreaded the fact that before the day was out he would have to face Muncrief too. If Muncrief's actually messing with Angie's games, I'll have to deal with him as well as Jace. And there goes the job, the career, everything. It doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong about him, Kyle will throw me out on my ear as soon as I accuse him of fooling around with Angela's games.

Maybe I should ask Vickie for help, he thought. Or maybe she's a part of this mess, covering up for Kyle. Sue doesn't trust her, and so far Sue's instincts have been one hundred percent on the mark.

He was driving slowly over the speed bumps as he headed for the back parking lot before he realized he had reached the ParaReality building. No, he told himself as he parked the Honda beneath one of the swaying willows. Jace gimmicked the F-22 sim and he's rigged Angie's school games. If I'm right, he's killed two men and he's helping Muncrief mess with my daughter's mind. I talk to Jace face-to-face and if Muncrief's involved the way Sue thinks he is, then I brace him too. Not Vickie. No in-betweens. They're messing with my daughter and I'm going to find out who and why.

He was trembling inside by the time he reached his office. Without bothering to do more than hang his sports coat on the peg back of the door, he started down the corridor toward Jace's lab. He saw that the light over the door to the VR lab was blinking red. Somebody in there already? Dan cracked the metal door slightly. Three technicians sat in the cramped control booth, hunched over the glowing, humming monitor screens. Surprised, Dan slid into the booth and let the heavy door spring shut behind him. Sure enough, Jace was in the VR chamber, decked in helmet and gloves, shuffling around like a gawky scarecrow, windmilling his arms in dreamy slow motion.

Leaning between two of the techs, Dan flicked the intercom switch. "Jace, it's me. I need to talk to you."

"Not now."

"Now," Dan said firmly.

"No! I'm busy."

"Jace, if I have to shut down this sim—"

The scarecrow figure looked straight at him, as if he could see through the opaque visor on his helmet and the one-way window. "Listen up, Danno. Our buddy Smith's bringing some hotshot from Washington in here this morning to see what I've done for them. I don't have time to talk to you now. This afternoon. After lunch."

All three of the technicians were staring up at Dan. Fuming, frustrated, desperately wanting to have it out with Jace yet knowing that he should let him get on with his work, unwilling to make a scene in front of the technicians. Dan clenched his fists in helpless fury and stamped back to his own office.

You can't let him off the hook, he told himself. You've got to pin him to the wall.

He felt a tendril of irritation in his chest; not pain, exactly, but a raw burning sensation, the warning of worse to come. Dan sat at his desk and tried to will the asthma away. As always, the more he fought against it the tenser he became and the more difficult it became to breathe. A biofeedback loop, he realized. A negative one.

Turning to his keyboard, he angrily punched up the latest results of the AI system's debugging work on the stuttering program. I should have been doing this myself, he grumbled inwardly. This is my responsibility and I've turned it over to a set of algorithms.

Well, okay, so the Chan kid is riding herd on it, Dan said to himself as he peered at the lines of programming. But still . . .

He did not realize that three hours had gone by. He was deeply into the debugging routine, his chest feeling better, his cares about Jace and Muncrief buried for the moment, when he heard Smith's loud, self-assured voice coming down the corridor.

"What'll you see it," Smith was saying. "It's like nothing you've ever been into before."

Dan looked up from his display screen and saw Smith pass his open doorway, walking beside a slight, sallow-faced young man in an expensive-looking gray silk suit. Must be the bigshot from Washington, Dan told himself. Can't be any older than Smith himself. It puzzled Dan. He had always thought that the government was run by order men. Even the women in Congress and the White House were gray, mature. Yet Smith was a puppy in comparison and this so-called big shot was just as young. Are these the staff people who make the decisions that really count?

Vickie was trailing behind them while Smith continued to extol virtual reality almost at the top of his lungs. The guy with him must be deaf, Dan thought. Or Smith is wired really high. Curious, he got up from his desk and went into the corridor, leaving his work on the computer screen.

"Is that our visitor from Washington?" Dan asked Vickie.

She seemed startled. "You're not involved in this any more, Dan."

"I started this work," he said.

"It's Jace's project now."

Smith and his visitor had reached the door to the Wonderland chamber. Smith had his back to Dan, the visitor was turned so Dan saw him full-face. It was a sour face, young but as pinched and bitter as a man on a diet of lemons. The guy was already balding; his high forehead gleamed in the overhead lights. His thin mouth turned down at the corners.

"Listen, Chuck," he said, breaking into Smith's nonstop sales pitch. "I just hope you're not wasting the taxpayer's money on some cockamamie super-high-tech bullshit. This stuff never works right and I'm not going to let you or anybody else sell us a bill of goods. Understand me?"

Spreading his hands like an innocent facing martyrdom, Smith replied, "Hey, I'm not selling you a bill of goods. All I want you to do is try this for just a few minutes. See what we've got here. That's all I ask."

"You made me come all the way down here just to play some video game for a few minutes?" The man's voice was like an audible toothache.

"Try it," Smith urged. "Just try it."

The other man huffed and hawed with unconcealed poor grace.

"Dan, this does not involve you." Vickie said firmly.

He looked into her eyes, noticing for the first time that they were a strange opalescent gray, almond shaped, almost oriental. For an instant he wanted to confront her with his suspicions about Muncrief and Angela, but something in him made him back away from that.

"Yeah," he said flatly. "I've got work to do."

And he went back to his office, where his computer still displayed the debugging program.

Hal Perry was shaking with fear, soaked with sweat. All through the battle at the hacienda he had done nothing more than cringe behind the bushes edging the parking lot, shaking with terror as the soldiers and drug gang's men fought it out with submachine guns and hand grenades. He had hunkered down on his hands and knees, buried his face in the dirt, while the bullets whined and explosions rocked the air.

But now the battle was over. The drug lord's men were dead or captured, the hacienda burning furiously; flames shot through the roof higher than the trees towering around the compound. The soldiers were leading their prisoners to waiting helicopters; the medics were tending the wounded. Other soldiers were dragging their own dead toward the team who waited by one of the choppers with the body bags.

We won, Perry told himself. It worked. The attack was a success. We won. Still he shook with fear. He had never even watched a gun being fired.

He tried to regain control of himself, wondering if the soldiers were real and able to see him, wondering if Chuck Smith and those other guys in the control booth could tell how frightened he was. It's natural, he told himself. Totally natural. They threw me out in the middle of a fucking fire fight! Naturally I'm shook up a little. It's so damned realistic I thought I was going to get my ass shot off. He took deep breaths, trying to calm himself, trying to regain control of his trembling knees.