The Goliath Stone (14 page)

“It beats the daylights out of me. But the attorney general certainly has to know about it. In which case, if they really believe this is a threat, then to threaten and antagonize the only other people who might be able to help with the problem is essentially an act of war against the United States of America, and Bob Foster should probably have Steve Wellman arrested for treason.”

“That seems extreme.”

“You mean, compared to locking up a bunch of old farts with no money who can barely get around, and claiming they’re terrorists so you can force them to work for free?”

The camera view cut to a walker in the corner of the interview room, then the screen switched back to Fahy outside the building. “Josephine Bartlett has had two hip replacements and reinforcing pins put in her right forearm. Another arrestee, Renee Dandridge, was employed by Watchstar as a cleaning lady, and requires regular medication to allow her to sleep without her lungs filling with fluid. Others have problems of their own. It’s difficult to imagine such people presenting a threat. AOL-CBS is working to get the arrestees bail hearings, or at least have them moved to a facility where they can get decent medical care, but there’s strong resistance from the Department of Homeland Security.”

The next image showed a grainy view of Attorney General Wellman getting into his limousine, with a banner across the bottom of the screen that said
LAPEL CAMERA
. He was scowling out of the screen. “Aiding and abetting threats to the safety of this country is a crime. If you’re not with us you’re against us. Now stop questioning me or I’ll arrest you as an accomplice.”

Cut to Fahy outside the holding facility again: “A two-hundred-billion-ton meteor is getting four miles closer to Earth every second. The administration’s response to this is, ‘Don’t ask questions.’ And there you have it.”

The next segment was “The Last Word,” and was about the flammable propellants used in spray cans. Toby shut off his screen. May shut hers off. Toby said, “I wonder if we’ll ever see Stephen Wellman again.”

XIX

Where neither their property nor their honor is touched, most men live content.

—NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

Alice saw
Lowdown
that night too. She didn’t expect Wellman to be disappeared. She expected his deputy, Lisa Frost, to take over as AG when he retired for reasons of health. She started a security search of May Wyndham’s records and went to bed.

On Monday morning, Alice checked the results, then sent a message to May Wyndham’s old e-mail address. It hadn’t been used to send anything in years, but it had been a lifetime account, so she might still look in on it.

Subject:
Launch system needed.

I work in DHS intelligence. Not all of us think the job consists of locking up people who object to us locking up people. The people at the National Appointee Sinecure Association are busy making the universe safe for robots, and we need something to get to the Rock before it gets to us. If you can help, I can get this approved as a Homeland Security Goal Project, and
you will get paid.

RSVP.

Alice Johnson

That done, she went to the Games again and hunted up Mycroft Yellowhorse. She hadn’t been able to get a number or an e-mail for him at all.

The Indians were friendly, unless someone called them Native Americans, in which case there followed lectures about marginalization. (As a Wheaton-born third-generation U.S. citizen of Kurdish ancestry, who kept being called “Arab”-American, she had no inclination to do any such thing; they got along.) They did seem to have helpful intentions, but that was about all they had.

She asked a boxer, who’d just knocked out the Bulgarian heavyweight four seconds after the bell, “Where can I find Mycroft Yellowhorse?”

He grinned. “Unless you catch him at breakfast, you can either wait until dinner, or look for a cloud of dust. That’ll be where he was last.”

She told a woman in wrestler’s tights, “I’d like to get hold of Mycroft Yellowhorse.”

“Who wouldn’t? —Try the judges’ box. He likes to go grin at them.”

She got to the cordon around the box and called out, “Mycroft Yellowhorse?”

Several people looked frantically in all directions, then turned to glare at her. A security man said, “You might try the arcade. They blanked the high scores again last night.” He was smiling faintly. Interesting.

She rented a cart to get to the Village shopping mall, which she hadn’t seen yet.

She never did get to see all of it. The size record had once been held by a mall in Canada, but even West Edmonton didn’t have
two
Baskin-Robbinses.

After half an hour or so, and repeated checks of the numerous standing maps, she found the arcade, which was on a floor she’d missed before. She plugged in her cart outside it, ending the rental—there were plenty more when she wanted to leave—and went inside.

Her first thought was that she should have kept the cart. The arcade alone was about half the size of one floor of a normal indoor mall.

Her second was that the proprietor was a genius. Every kid who had been dragged along to the Olympics for purposes of cultural edification, and gotten fed up with watching sweaty people grunt, had come here. There must have been thousands. They all had somewhere to sit—even the ones who were waiting for a game to be available. The
snack bar
was essentially a regular mall’s food court.

She headed for the snack bar, which was suddenly very appealing. It had been a long morning.

There was a crowd of kids around a Mastershot game. Other games had crowds around them, and the kids there were yelling when the player did well. These kids were quiet.

The player was a tall Indian with a long black braid down his back. He was playing two-gun mode, and shooting the guns out of the targets’ hands while they were still drawing. The screen showed he had accumulated thirty-six free games. The number changed to thirty-seven as he shot the horns off a four-armed demon. Alice worked her way around until she could see his face; she knew who it was, but she wanted to study his expression.

He had none. He was just watching, firing, and watching some more.

The crowd’s manner altered, many getting even more interested and nudging and murmuring to the ones who hadn’t. She wondered what was on the screen now.

Yellowhorse blazed away at the bottom of the screen, then fired at something at the top of the screen, then raised the pistols. There was a loud wet crunching noise from the speakers, and all the watchers said, “Ahhhhh.” He glanced at Alice and said something to a fat blond kid to his left. The kid’s eyes bugged out, he nodded rapidly, and Yellowhorse gave him the pistols. The crowd applauded, and Yellowhorse raised his hands in acceptance and left the thirty-seven replays to the kid who’d evidently been watching longest.

He came over to where she was, looked around, and began moving toward the snack bar. People moved aside for him.

Once they were through both sets of doors it was quiet. “What did I just miss?” she said.

“Achilles,” he said. “He’s indestructible. It’s a building site. You have to tear up the ground he’s standing on so he can’t use his speed, then drop a truckload of wet cement on him. After him it resets to level one. Come on, I’m rich, I’ll spring for some pizzas.”

“Do they have sushi?”

“Yeah, but I had that this morning. You go ahead, I’ll still spring.” He waved at somebody, made some complicated gestures, and accompanied her to the Japanese section.

“I knew JNAIT was doing well, but how rich do you have to be to get
tired of sushi
?” she exclaimed.

He looked extremely pleased with her. “You must be a damn fine analyst,” he said. “Not that rich. You do have to be able to afford it whenever you want, but you don’t have to be Marcus Crassus rich. He said no man should consider himself rich unless he could raise and maintain his own army.”

“So you’re not that rich, then.”

“Sure I am. I’m just saying you don’t need to be. And it still takes a while. Pick and choose, the boats always include something weird.”

“I can do weird.”

He raised an eyebrow interestedly.

“I just mean I can eat stuff like blowfish.”

The other eyebrow went up, and he smiled faintly.

She was starting to think she should have spent another day in her room. She turned to the counter and ordered a medium boat meal. She looked back and said, “Aren’t you eating?”

“I already ordered. You don’t have to know sign language in your job?”

“No, thank God. There’s too much detail in my head as it is.”

“Everything reminds you of everything?”

“Yes, exactly!”

He nodded. “Once you have your pension you should write.”

“Hah. My pension is in U.S. dollars.” The Mint had just started issuing five-hundred-dollar coins because it cost too much to print the bills, and the end was not in sight.

“Take a lump sum and immigrate to JNAIT.”

“Retire to another country from an intelligence job? Not for long.”

“They don’t bother us. JNAIT has the Bomb.”

She was horrified. “You realize they’d just slaughter you all if you destroyed a U.S. city, don’t you?”

“What U.S. city? We made it very clear to the State Department last year that if they didn’t stop their harassment we’d nuke
Mecca
.”

Thereby starting total jihad. Islam worldwide had six times the population of the United States, and dynamite was cheap. “Jesus Christ!”

“I wouldn’t count on it.” He grinned like a carnivore.

Definitely
another day in her room.

Which reminded her: “What did you do to me?”

“Not as— Order up.”

He was evidently at least as observant as she was. They got to the pickup counter at the same time as her tray, which she looked at aghast. She was accustomed to sushi being a sliver of fish you could read large print through, on top of about a domino’s worth of rice. This looked like some kind of international relief program. “This can’t be mine!”

“Soup, salad, twenty assorted pieces—including one coelacanth, and a bakemono maki,” he said. “It’s what you ordered.”

“Just wave and I’ll bring your ice cream when you’re done,” said the boy behind the counter.

She’d forgotten about the dessert. “So you’ll be here tomorrow?” she asked him.

He didn’t get it, but Yellowhorse did and laughed. “Give it your best shot,” he said. “You may surprise yourself.” They headed for a table.

“If I eat all this at one sitting I’ll turn into a blob,” she said as they sat.

He poured her some tea. “That would astonish me excessively. You just won’t get hungry for a longer while than usual.”

She used wasabi and ginger and took a bite to give herself time to think of an answer.

She ate four pieces before she could stop long enough to speak. When she did, she said, “There’s a question pending.”

It was his own line, and he smiled. “I didn’t do as much last week as you suppose. To give a more complete answer I’ll need you to keep your mind open.”

In the circumstances she was contemplating opening a lot more than her mind for him. “Could you hold off on the suggestive remarks, please?”

He raised that eyebrow again. “It didn’t come out that way over here. The problem must be at your end.”

After a moment’s thought, she said, “That one was on purpose.”

“Yes, it was.” He smiled, and was interrupted by the arrival of a pizza that wouldn’t have fitted on her nightstand at home. It was accompanied by two quart bottles of milk. He carded for them and began rearranging the bacon and pepperoni.

She spent a minute watching him meticulously ensure that every bite would have some of both. After some distracting thoughts about the precision of his hands, a connection was made in her head. “You’re the one they couldn’t find. Connors.”

He looked delighted. “Damn, kid, you are
good
!”

“I thought what you did to me was some kind of enzyme thing until I saw you fixing your pizza. Nanotechnology has to be right the first time and never go wrong, doesn’t it?”

“Right. We had to stop holding office potlucks because people were gaining so much weight. There were an awful lot of good cooks at Littlemeade.”

“That was what Watchstar used to be called?”

“More precisely—” He looked at her to see if she got the mild joke, and showed a flash of disappointment. “It’s what Watchstar bought out. Aside from people who worked there, there was only one investor in common with both. She wanted to be able to revive someone who was frozen after death. Third most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. I’m still working on that problem.
Lots
more details than keeping someone alive. As you say, it has to be right the first time.”

“‘Third most beautiful’?” He kept a
list
?

“You have already called attention to the fact that I observe rigorous standards in some things.” He uncapped a milk bottle, arranged a stack of paper napkins with the precision of a scrub nurse laying out surgical sponges, and started eating pizza.

It was searing hot and dripping oil, and he got none of the orange grease on his chin, his clothes, or anything but his fingers and the rest of the pizza.

He worked on the pizza with the dedicated resolve of a man with a commitment. She resumed eating her sushi.

She actually got that whole meal down without feeling gorged. He was almost done with his pizza, and she began policing the table. When he was done eating, he said, “You can smoke here, you know.”

“I quit eight yea— how’d— the table. Yes. We pick up after ourselves.” He was better at her job than she was.

He nodded. “We do. I quit in 2000. Lost a very foolish bet. Saved a fortune, though. —You know, this place should really be out in the arena.”