Ghosts of Columbia (31 page)

Read Ghosts of Columbia Online

Authors: L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Alternate History, #United States, #Literature & Fiction

BOOK: Ghosts of Columbia
5.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
B
efore I left my hotel room Monday morning, I put together the two press packets. The first contained copies of the two letters from “Branstonpackets. to Minister Holmbek and copies of the news stories with my name in them. They were thin—and that was the purpose. It had to appear to the reporters that I was on to something but just couldn’t carry it off myself.
The second was the follow-on package from the “Spirit Preservation League,” the one I needed to personally send later in the day, after I’d hand-delivered the first classy set of announcements.
After another breakfast of two too many sweet rolls and more bitter tea from Bread and Chocolate, I returned to my room, pasted a goatee in place, and put on a better, tailored suit, covered with my less reputable trench coat when I left the hotel. Two blocks down the street, I took off the coat and folded it over my arm, hailing a cab.
“Where to, sir?”
“Fifteenth Street entrance of the
Post-Dispatch.”
It took less than an hour for the four quick drops—at the
Post-Dispatch,
the
Evening Star,
the
Monitor,
and the RPI wire service.
Only the
Monitor
reception desk clerk looked at me and asked, “What is it?”
“Purely social, my dear,” I answered in my driest and haughtiest accent.
I gave the driver a ten for the entire trip—a five-dollar fare—regretted publicly my lack of dispatch in not dealing with the whole sordid matter earlier, and in general behaved like an overconcerned upper-class ninny.
That done, I put the trench coat back on and walked the two blocks back to the hotel, passing vanBuren Place. The ghost was nowhere to be seen, but two gray-haired men played checkers on one of the stone benches. A young woman, probably a ministry clerk, sat silently sobbing on a corner bench under a juniper. I wanted to console her, but how could I tell a complete stranger things would be all right, especially when I was working to ensure they wouldn’t be for some people, just to save my own skin?
I took a deep breath and walked on, reclaiming the Stanley from the hotel lot. I drove out toward Maryland, turning onto Georgia Avenue until I reached the big Woodward and Vandervaal, where I pulled into the public lot. The sky was clouding up, and raindrops sprinkled the windscreen. There was a public wireset in a kiosk behind the hedges, open to the car park but not to Georgia Avenue.
I swallowed and dialed vanBecton’s office.
“Minister vanBecton’s office.”
“This is Doktor Eschbach. Is he in?”
“Ah, well, Doktor …”
“Yes or no? If you have time to trace this, so do the people he doesn’t want to trace it.”
“Just a moment, sir.”
The transfer was smooth.
“Where are you, Johan?”
“On my way down to see you, provided I can get there without getting torn up in the process.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Why not? You know very well who else wants me in out of the cold, so that I can be put coldly away.”
“And we’re supposed to save you from that folly? Dream on.”
“Absolutely. And I have some goodies for you to persuade you to let me do just that. I’ll wire you again, and you can let me know.”
I hung up, hoping the call would persuade vanBecton to wait just a bit. It also confirmed he was in town. I got back into the Stanley, paid for my brief stint in the car park, and headed back downtown through a misting drizzle. The traffic was heavier than I had recalled, with more horns honking, and even swearing and gestures from neighboring drivers, although not at me. At least, I didn’t think so.
A frizzy-blond-haired girl in brown leathers—the country look, I gathered—drove a steam-truck over the median to pass a stalled green Reo. An oncoming hauler sideswiped a boxy old black Williams to avoid her, and she sailed down Georgia with an obscene gesture at the hauler. The rest of us crept by the mess, and I wiped my forehead. Sometimes traffic was worse than the trench-coat-and-wide-brimmed-hat business.
I put the Stanley back in the Pick House’s car park and then walked down to the Hay-Adams and found a public wireline booth off the lobby. Like the Albert Pick House, the Hay-Adams had seen better days. Unlike the Pick House, the Adams still retained a touch of class, with the carved woodwork, the polished floors, and the hushed reverence and attentiveness of the staff.
The doorman had even bowed slightly to me, without a trace of condescension to my wrinkled trench coat. Of course, I wasn’t wearing a cheap wool suit, either. Even the wireline booth had a wall seat with an upholstered velour cushion—deep green.
With my case in my lap, I put in the dime and dialed one number, but it just rang. So I tried a second. It rattled with a busy sound. The third got me an answer.
“Railley here.”
“Matt, this is the Colonel Nord doktor. Don’t mention my name out loud. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Are you interested in proof that the Speaker is playing both sides against the middle on the psychic research issue? And that the Defense Ministry is up to its eyeballs in this?”
“Shit, yes.”
“Fine. You’ll get it. In the meantime, ask yourself this question. Why is it that there have been very few of these Babbage bombings and fires until the Speaker formed his new government? Why does he want to use this issue against President Armstrong? What does he gain?”
“Hold it! What do you know about the Order of Jeremiah?”
“The what?” I lied.
“Order of Jeremiah. I got some trash from them claiming that the ‘corrupt federal government’ is attacking the spirits of their ancestors.”
“What else is new?” I asked. “Every organized religion around has protested the government’s psychic research efforts. They haven’t gotten very far, though. The research seems to be going on.” I paused, then added, “I’ve got to go. Watch for a package.”
I hung up.
Then I called two more numbers, including Murtaugh at the
Evening Star
, with essentially the same message. Murtaugh didn’t ask me about the Order of Jeremiah, and he’d probably dismissed it without reading it. Either that or he was playing it close to the waistcoat.
Neither asked me about the Spirit Preservation League, but given the volume of Monday offerings they received, I doubted that either had seen the envelopes, classy as they were. I would have liked to space things more, but time was something I just didn’t have.
My briefcase felt heavier and heavier as I walked back to the hotel in the light rain that the radio hadn’t forecast.
The entire situation was insane. To get out of the mess I was in, I was essentially going to have to give both the Speaker and the President what they wanted—except without my hide flayed over the package for wrapping paper. I didn’t like either Speaker Hartpence or President Armstrong, but that wasn’t the question. The question was who could do more damage, and the answer to that was clear enough.
Ahead in the shadows of the alley off L, people dodged toward the street, apparently leaving an open space. As I approached, I saw why. The ghost of a child, probably not more than five, screamed for his mother, his hands stretched up toward the iron fire ladder above. My guts twisted, and my eyes burned. I watched tears stream down the face of a heavyset, well-dressed black woman. She just stood and looked, and I wondered if the child had been hers and what had happened.
Finally I walked on, thinking about the child ghost. He was certainly a disruption, probably unwanted by everyone except his mother. Probably all the major powers had some way of getting rid of unwanted ghosts, yet no one was implementing the technology on a wide scale. Why not?
First there was the religious angle. Ferdinand didn’t want to offend the Roman Catholic Church or the Lutherans, or take on the Apostolic Eastern Catholic Church. Speaker Hartpence certainly didn’t want to take on everyone from the Mormons to the Roman Catholics, and Emperor Akihito wouldn’t want to disrupt the ancestor worship that was still prevalent; nor would the warlords and the emperor of Chung Kuo.
Second was the practical angle. Ghosts kept wars smaller and less expensive. The ghost angle probably was one of the things that had restricted the deployment of nuclear weapons.
Third was the fact that the present situation allowed for hidden and selective use of ghosting-related technologies, and a more obvious use of those technologies would not have been exactly well received, particularly in more open societies like Columbia or Great Britain.
In short, nobody wanted the genie out of the box, and that meant nobody was quite sure what was in anyone else’s box.
Then there was the personal angle. Ghosts were perhaps the last contact with loved ones. Did any government really want to be perceived as severing that contact? What would the press say if the government wanted to take that child’s ghost from his mother?
I stopped by the car park and locked my case in the trunk, after first removing the press packages and the goatee. The doorman at the Albert Pick didn’t quite sniff at me and my buttoned-up trench coat as I carried my damp self back into the hotel and to my room. First I turned on the video to the all-news station. The talking heads discussed everything from the upcoming negotiations over Japanese nuclear submersible technology to the federal watch subsidy for Columbia City. There wasn’t a word about ghosts or me. Although that wasn’t conclusive, it helped settle my stomach, until I thought about what else I had to do. While I listened, I changed into the blue coveralls that could be a uniform for anything and fixed a short beard in place. As two impeccably groomed men exchanged views on the continuing landing-rights controversy between turbojets and dirigibles in every major air park in the country, I clicked off the set and listened at the hallway door.
When it appeared relatively silent, I slipped out carrying the press packages. I took the service stairs down to the lobby, where I just walked out to the street. This time the doorman didn’t sniff at me; he merely ignored me.
The first stop was the
Post-Dispatch.
I walked in off Fifteenth Street with my stack of messages and a log sheet bound to the top.
“Envelope for Railley,” I announced.
“We’ll take it here,” answered the bored desk clerk.
I offered the log sheet, which had two bogus entries above a group of empty lines. “Signature here, please.”
She signed, and I handed over the envelope, marked CONFIDENTIAL. At least she didn’t rip it open while I was standing there.
Then I took a trolley down and along Pennsylvania to the Star building, where I repeated the process.
By the time I finished with the press and the four wire services, I was soaked, even though the rain wasn’t that heavy, and tired. Still, I took the service stairs back up to my room.
I dried off and changed back into my hard wool suit, except now I wore the special vest that was actually made of thin sheets of plastique covered with a thin coat of vinyl that could be peeled off. Neither odor detectors nor metal detectors will show anything besides a vest. It’s hot, hell to wear in the summer, but in late fall, heat wasn’t a problem. The plastic timer went into the compartment behind the big belt buckle. Then I reclaimed my trench coat and put the rest of my clothes in the garment bag. I descended officially—without beard—to the lobby, where I checked out, using cash and getting a frown from the clerk. After stowing the garment bag in the Stanley, I had a ham and rye sandwich at Brother George’s, with more bitter tea, before getting the Stanley from the car park. In its dull, almost mottled gray guise, it looked rather like a company car, perhaps a shade too good but not that noticeably expensive.
I drove around the north side of the shabby train station—Union Station hadn’t been kept up the way the B&P station had been—and parked about four blocks east of the Capitol. Then I stretched out in the back seat and took a nap. I could have done that at the hotel, except that single men who stay in their hotel rooms during the week are extremely suspect. More important, I wanted Peter Hloddn on the road before all hell broke loose. Even if the watch stopped and woke me, I could claim that, as a traveling ledgerman, I was resting between appointments.
Around four I sat up, not that rested, since I hadn’t so much slept as dozed with a continuing thought to time. I locked the Stanley and took a trolley. The sky was clear again, and a chill wind blew out of the west.
All the Capitol limousines are housed in the top level of the underground New Jersey Avenue garage, and that is linked to the Roosevelt Office Building by a tunnel off the subbasement. Unlike the ministry buildings, the tunnels aren’t guarded, just the outside entrances to the buildings and garages. Congressmen and congressladies don’t like being stopped going to and from the Capitol building or anywhere else.
So I only had to get into the Capitol, which was easy enough on the last public tour, and then discard the visitor badge and replace it with my own badge, since guards only looked for government badges, not names, once you were inside. If I’d walked in with my own, I would have had to sign in. As a tourist, I’d had to show the Hloddn ID, but no one ever cross-checked. How could they with all the tourists?

Other books

Signs and Wonders by Bernard Evslin
Stripped Bear by Kate Baxter
Welcome to Envy Park by Esguerra, Mina V.
The Rebel by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
A Passion for Killing by Barbara Nadel
Feedback by Mira Grant
Very Bad Things by Sam Crescent, Jenika Snow
I Heart Paris by Lindsey Kelk