Eye Contact (44 page)

It is indeed a laser projector, as are the other units, to be used in creating the sky show that will spin a dazzling pink triangle in the heavens, a symbol of gay rights hovering over the new stadium as a finale to tonight’s opening ceremonies. But this unit alone has special capabilities, developed with the reluctant assistance of Buddy, Cain’s friend at the Pentagon. This unit alone employs a new laser technology born of devilish theories of electromagnetic physics understood by only a handful of military specialists. This unit alone is linked to an orbiting communications satellite. This unit alone is linked to vast banks of computer power that will enable it to perform dizzying calculations during the course of the spectacle, that will enable it to reprogram its linked satellite for a covert purpose. This unit alone has the power to kill.

Cain completes his walkabout of the device and laughs aloud at its fearsome, outlandish appearance. It looks like a prop out of some cheap sci-fi flick. In truth, it was cobbled together from various parts of existing hardware, a secret prototype of a sinister weapon that will be used only once. The tractor seat and its array of controls serve no purpose whatever, more easily left intact than removed for purity of function. No marksman, however accomplished, could operate this contraption with sufficient speed and precision; it must be guided by the simultaneous calculations of a hidden computer network, harnessing together innocuous banks of gigabytes and megahertz. Racks and cabinets bulge with electronics at three separate locales—in a basement in Washington, in Cain’s suite of offices, and across town in the laboratory assigned to Dr. Pavo Zarnik at Civic Planetarium.

So the Zarnik ruse, the tenth planet, was merely a cover, a diversion, to keep the press busy while the final phase of this project was readied for tonight. But the planet scam was nearly exposed, twice, and two of Cain’s reporters had to die at his own hand. He is convinced that their deaths, though regrettable, will be far overshadowed and quickly forgotten in the wake of the climactic finale to tonight’s spectacle.

It was ironic that Clifford Nolan tided his exposé “Requiem for a Small Planet.” It was clever, succinct, and ever-so-slightly smug—qualities that Cain always admired in Nolan’s writing. But when Cain saw that headline on his own computer screen while Nolan sat at home drafting the story, he knew that Nolan’s phrase-turning days must end. Visiting Nolan at his apartment that night, Cain laughed with the writer as they discussed Zarnik’s preposterous claim. While Nolan typed, he suggested to Cain, “Why don’t you play something while I drive the final nails into Zarnik’s coffin. A
Requiem
would be fitting. Take your pick—Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi.”

Verdi, thought Cain. Perfect. He removed the CD from its case, scrupulously polished both sides of it with his black silk pocket handkerchief, and dropped it into the machine. Behind Nolan’s back, he pressed the “play” button, his index finger covered by the handkerchief. The solemn opening measures of the music began to fill the room. “Scan to the good part,” Nolan told Cain over his shoulder.

Cain knew what Nolan meant—he was asking for the “Dies Irae” section, the “Day of Wrath.” With a silk-clad finger, Cain cued up the music, spun up the volume, and pressed “play” again. Then, timed to Verdi’s four explosive blasts, the crack of doomsday, he fired four bullets into Clifford Nolan’s back with the rarest of rare Nambu pistols, the one sent to him by a friend he called Buddy.

Again Cain recalls the hospital tent in Korea and Buddy’s horrible admission of love. Cain remembers when Buddy sent him the pistol, a token of friendship that made it all too easy for Cain, years later, to threaten sending it back, to threaten he’d return it so that Buddy might fire it into his own temple. It never came to that, thank God. Buddy proved both his friendship to Cain and his love of country. He knew how to accomplish tonight’s spectacle. He was the builder, while Cain was the architect. And the “client,” so to speak—the inspiration behind the whole project—was none other than the Christian Family Crusade and its guiding force, Elder Burlington Buchman. So, then, knowledge of tonight’s plan is shared by only three people: Cain, Buddy, and Buchman.

Conspiracy is an ugly concept, Cain tells himself, but at times it is necessary—times like these. These are the times when the perversion of homosexuality has broken out of its closet and thrust itself upon society at large. The plague of AIDS might have stopped it, but failed. There’s been talk of “gay rights” for over a generation, and by now it’s crept into the national consciousness. It’s gone so far, politicians routinely pay lip service to it and even the archbishop has begun blathering about “inclusion”—so much for
his
friendship. The agenda it clear enough: Homosexuality is to be placed on an equal moral footing with heterosexuality. That’s just for starters. Then comes job protection, marriage, and finally, that last holdout of decency, the military itself. If the courts don’t ram it down our throats, eventually the sway of public opinion will. It must be stopped. The CFC has waged a noble war, but now, just when their efforts have begun to reverse this hideous trend, the homosexual agenda is glorified by a festival that will be watched by the whole world. Politicians can’t line up fast enough to add their voices to the din, hoping to curry favor with this powerful minority as the stakes are raised for the next election. They’re all here tonight, down at the stadium, raising their voices in a sordid plea for “tolerance.” My ass! And worst among them, a traitor to his nation who has betrayed every principle of traditional values, is a sitting president of the United States.

“With a single magnificent gesture,” Cain told Buddy, “working with the CFC, we can rid our nation of this menace. The president himself and thousands of vocal sympathizers will all be silenced.”

“Nathan, you’re mad,” replied Buddy, certain Cain was joking.

But Cain’s threat to return the Nambu pistol proved he was in earnest, and Buddy, for the first time in his life both helpless and frightened, signed on. He committed untold resources, shrouded beneath the tightest levels of national security, to construct and install the laser hardware. In order to help prevent detection or tracing, however, he insisted that the final phase of Project Zarnik would have to be executed by hand. Nathan Cain was to pull the switch—two of them, in fact—an assignment he eagerly accepted.

According to plan, tonight at six o’clock precisely, he flipped the green switch, which fired up the intricate network of computer power, linking the three projectors and running them through a lengthy warm-up cycle of checks and counterchecks.

Now, at nine o’clock precisely, just as the president has finished his speech, Cain is ready to flip the pink switch, which will initiate the sky show while linking the whole system to laser weaponry that orbits silently overhead in the black void of space. As the spectacle of light progresses, it will gain power, climaxing in an “accident” of cataclysmic proportions. In a meeting late last night with Elder Buchman, Cain predicted, “When the firestorm explodes within the stadium, it will consume the president and everyone on the field.” While those in the stands may escape instant annihilation, thousands more will surely perish, trampled in the pandemonium.

Now, at nine o’clock precisely, the words of the “Dies Irae” echo from Nathan Cain’s childhood: “Day of wrath and day of mourning. See fulfilled the prophets’ warning.” The next line of the ancient dirge has taken on new meaning and immediacy: “Heav’n and earth in ashes burning …”

Now, at nine o’clock precisely, Nathan Cain knows that the moment has arrived to execute the final phase of a plan that has consumed him for nearly a year. Standing atop the Journal Building’s tower platform with his thumb poised above a pink switch, he wonders what Buddy is doing right now. What’s he thinking at this moment when his technical expertise is about to change the course of history? And Burlington Buchman—what’s going through his mind in this instant when his great crusade will enter its finest hour?

Overhead, the sky glows purple with twilight. Below, the city glows orange with the light of countless sodium-vapor lamps. But the brightest lights down there—Cain sees them clearly—emanate from the new stadium where a hundred thousand citizens cheer their president. Cain is sure he can hear them through the constant winds that blow past the peak of the tower.

These thoughts and perceptions, real and imagined, have coursed through Cain’s mind in a mere millisecond. With a decisive snap, his thumb engages the simple mechanism of the switch.

With a jolt, the projector powers up and shoots dual beams from its long snout, aimed at the other two projection sites. Simultaneously, the other two projectors emit their own beams, forming a miles-wide triangle over the city. The perfectly straight beams of pink laser light look like giant tubes of neon in the sky, aglisten with the random passings of dust, insects, a bird here and there.

Nathan Cain is awed by its beauty, though he detests what it represents. Be patient, he tells himself. This spectacle is far from over.

At nine o’clock precisely, the banks of computers in Zarnik’s lab suddenly shift to a more active mode. Their hum, which Manning and Farber have ceased to notice, rises in pitch and settles into a steady, irritating whine.

“Here we go,” says Manning, bracing himself in his chair, not sure what may happen next, expecting the worst. But nothing does happen, and after a minute has passed, he relaxes his grip on the edge of the desk. Then—just in case—he rises from the chair, crosses to the fire cabinet mounted near the door, and opens it. He tells Farber, “I may not know a lick about computers, but this stuff sounds like it’s working too hard. If something overheats, I want to be prepared.” He removes the ax and sets it on the floor. The water hose would be of no use for an electrical fire, so he leaves it stowed. Then he lifts an extinguisher from its hook and carries it back to the desk.

“Hey,” says Farber, pointing to the TV screen, “check it out.”

The crowds at the stadium coo as one, looking skyward as the lines of the huge pink triangle sparkle in the heavens. A camera cuts to the presidential party, seated onstage. They clap and smile, pointing to the laser display. Then the camera pans a bit of the crowd nearby, and once again Manning spots Neil seated between Roxanne and Claire. Neil’s head is thrown back to gaze at the light show; in his hand there’s a sheaf of folded papers. A collective gasp rises from the spectators, and the camera again aims at the night sky, where the triangle, which at first consisted of lines that stretched all the way from projector to projector, has begun to condense itself. As the triangle shrinks to the size of the stadium itself, it no longer appears merely in outline, but hovers overhead as a solid plane of glimmering, undulating pink light.

The computers in the lab whine even louder now, and the clicking of relay switches intensifies to a racket. Farber’s glance darts about the room as he reaches for his glass and downs the last of his drink. Manning sits at the desk again, watching the spectacle on television, drumming his fingers on top of the fire extinguisher.

At nine o’clock precisely, at her desk in Nathan Cain’s outer offices, Lucille Haring is navigating the deepest recesses of Cain’s personal directories when something happens to the computer—a network glitch perhaps, a momentary flash on the screen. Then she realizes that the computer is responding more slowly to her commands. It seems the whole system is bogged down.

That’s strange. She wrings her brows. Backing out of Cain’s directories, she takes a look at the
Journal’s
mainframe, wondering if anything might catch her eye. And it does. The data flashing on her screen reveal sudden, intense activity on many of the
Journal’s
phone lines, which are being used to both transmit and receive complex digital signals—there’s a heap of numbers being crunched. Very strange.

She sits back in her chair, locks both hands behind her head, and stares at the screen, watching the activity of the mainframe as a whole, which is dominated by all this phone stuff. Then a little stream of data prances past, which she can identify as editorial matter, a story, being sent to the newsroom. What was that?

She hunkers over the keyboard again, intrigued, and tries to trace that errant bit of coding. It was sent to the editorial page, an opinion column, but who sent it? Manning? No, she sees his stories, queued up and blinking, right where she left them. So she traps the stream of data, stops it, and keyboards a code that will trace its source—and
bang,
she finds herself right back in Nathan Cain’s directories. A hidden subdirectory, “editorial buffer,” is now exposed. Cain had a story waiting there all along, coded to be sent to the newsroom at this hour. A few keystrokes later, the story, slugged “cataclysm,” appears on her screen.

Lucille Haring reads the first couple of sentences, then stops with a loud gasp. She needs to catch her breath before she can read on.

With his fingers still drumming the top of the fire extinguisher, Manning watches the pink triangle as it floats above the stadium. He wonders, with the crowd he sees on television, whether the spectacle has climaxed or if there is more to come. Their question is soon answered as the triangle shrinks tighter and grows brighter, descending slowly through the sky till it rests not far from the top row of bleachers. The spectators roar their approval.

With the transition to this next phase of the laser show, the equipment in Zarnik’s lab revs to an even higher pitch. “This is all very nice,” Arlen Farber tells Manning, slurring, wagging his empty glass at the monitor, “but if someone isn’t careful, they’re going to blow a fuse.”

Manning isn’t sure how many drinks Farber has swilled this evening, but they’ve been sufficient to dull his concern for any impending danger. He actually seems to be enjoying himself now, getting into the spirit of the festival. Manning, however, feels nothing but dread—an uncertain but intense uneasiness. He wishes there were some way to communicate with Neil and tell him to get out of there.