What Came After (16 page)

Weller was in his old clothes. The engineer striped coveralls, cleaned and pressed by some invisible hand but entirely beyond salvage. The scarred workboots burned and cut as if they’d been worn throughout some invasion. The baseball cap, its logo that of a team that hadn’t played a single inning in his lifetime. You couldn’t go on the road in a suit and a dress shirt. You couldn’t get any real work done in a suit and a dress shirt. Anyone knew that. When he’d gotten back into his old clothes and said goodbye to his wife and daughter, Liz had said that seeing him dressed that way made it worse. She’d said if he’d gone wearing a borrowed suit it would have been a little bit like saying goodbye to somebody else, while this was saying goodbye to the man she loved. No question about it and no disguise to shield her from the truth. The only man she’d ever loved.

Planes still flew out of Newark now and then, a few rattletrap commuters plying the old trade routes between Washington and Boston. The mighty coastline megalopolis that had never quite materialized and was now breaking back down into its constituent parts. The commuters were unreliable and dangerous, and their schedules were uncertain, so the helicopter was bound for the remains of a military airfield near Lodi, New Jersey. A Black Rose outpost off limits to civilians as a rule, but money bought exceptions. The trip would take minutes. Weller sat inside a gleaming bubble of glass strapped tight to the seat, and he didn’t know where to look first. The helicopter rising up with the harbor in view and the ocean beyond that and the coastline stretching away to the south. No significant traffic on the water at all. Nothing in motion except a couple of little power boats. Big ships docked like shackled ghosts at abandoned piers and others rusted through and sunken into deep water dragging entire wharves into the drink after them and a handful of others lying in dry-dock halfbroken. The industry of these places having reversed itself for a while. Dismantling great ships for raw materials until the market dried up and the dismantling ran out of steam and the work was over.

The helicopter swooped into a wide semicircle and they banked to swing west over the Hudson. This part of New Jersey greener than it had been in a hundred years or maybe twice that. Nature recovering faster than anyone could have imagined. Enormous oil tanks draped with greenery like antique places of learning or remote jungle redoubts. Refineries themselves refined by weather and years to raw steel and rust, making their slow journey back into the ground. Most remarkable were the networks of empty roads, crumbled and grassed over smooth and stretching into vast distance like carpets for some green world-consuming king whose arrival mankind had awaited forever.
Make straight in the desert a highway.
Of all of these roads only Ninety-five, fenced in and maintained by National Motors, endured intact.

The pilot wore black sunglasses and spoke into a radio when he spoke at all, an intermittent stream of codes and numbers, low terse talk incomprehensible to Weller. Both of them wore thick padded headphones that blocked some of the hammering of the rotors and the wind but did little to improve the other side of whatever conversation was under way. The hard numerical language of robots.

Weller spotted the airfield from a distance. The runway a single thin stretch of pavement unmolested amid the greenery, with a little tower and a long low hangar standing close to it alongside what looked like a barracks. The rest of the buildings all collapsed to the ground or dismantled and hauled away. Not a single road leading in or out. No car or truck traveling the concrete runway or parked alongside any of the structures. As if every earthbound vehicle had been raptured up. Weller looked north and east and saw another highway joining Ninety-Five, an east-west strip veering away into the unknown. He pointed and made questioning noises and the pilot shouted
Eighty.
Where it passed by to the north it couldn’t have been more than a quarter mile from what remained of the runway, and yet all connections to it were gone. The men who lived here lived here for one purpose only.

The pilot chose a painted circle on the concrete and lowered the helicopter toward it, and six men emerged from the hangar. Moving quickly and with purpose, no motion wasted. Grim by practice and inclination. They wore black boots and dark green uniforms and soft dark berets cocked identically over identically shaven heads, and their weapons were holstered tight. One of them waved the helicopter down. A formality but what wasn’t. Everything done by the book.

A pair of them escorted Weller out of the helicopter and back toward the hangar. The pilot bending over his paperwork and no more acknowledging his leaving than he’d have acknowledged a cargo container. Not lifting a hand. He had spoken one word to him altogether. Eighty. And even that word wasn’t really a word but a number.

Weller was certain that a look was passing between the men on either side of him. Something judgmental. Something about his fitness for the job he was undertaking. His thick glasses and his raggedy sparkburnt coveralls and his greasy baseball cap. The way he walked, like a different kind of beast from the two of them.

The beating of the rotors slowed and stopped, and he hazarded a question. “Either of you two fellows ever been to Spartanburg?”

They laughed without a trace of humor. It was just air coming out. The same laugh that wasn’t a laugh came from each of them as if they’d been practicing it.

“I guess that’s a no,” said Weller.

“You bet your ass it’s a no,” said one of the men. It didn’t matter which.

“Nobody’s been to Spartanburg for ten or fifteen years,” said the other.

“How come?”

“Nobody goes there anymore.”

It didn’t seem like much of an answer. They walked on.

After a little, one of the men spoke to the other. “I knew a guy who served with Marlowe once,” he said.

“I don’t believe it,” said the other.

“Believe it.”

“You knew somebody who actually served with Marlowe?” He said the name the way a person might say the name of God or the Devil.

“I did. This was Afghanistan. Back when Marlowe was Navy.”

“Marlowe was Navy?”

“SEAL.”

“Right.” Nodding his head as if that explained something.

They stepped out of the sun into the shade of the hangar. Weller stopped short and they went on. “Who’s Marlowe, anyway?” he asked.

“He’s an old man,” said one of them. “Come on.”

“What’s he got to do with Spartanburg?”

“Simple.” Heading toward an airplane that looked like a bullet with smaller bullets hung underneath it. A fighter jet. Weller catching up. “Marlowe is the reason nobody goes there.”

“Nobody? Not even you? Not even Black Rose?”

“Not even Black Rose.” Kicking a wheeled set of steps over to the plane.

One of the men climbed in and Weller followed him. “So let’s say Mr. Carmichael wanted to hire you fellows to go down there and bring him back something he’s got his heart set on.”

“I don’t believe we’d take the job.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“No sir. I don’t believe we would.” Belting himself in.

“Because of one old man,” said Weller.

“Because of one old man.”

*

Weller had time to think on the plane to Washington. Buffeted by the roar of twin engines and cutting through the air at close to the speed of sound and wondering why there should be any sound at all. There was nothing to see through the canopy but sky and clouds and water beading up on curved glass. Drops of it accumulating and sliding back leaving thin trails behind them and then the drops disappearing and the trails disappearing too. Then more water beading up and the process continuing. Over and over.

They landed on the Mall at the center of the grand pale public city, Washington become an immaculately preserved memorial to itself with only the monument to its namesake missing. That mighty obelisk cleared years ago to make way for this landing strip, torn down stone by stone and the pieces used to pave the reflecting pool. Crews drained the pool dry and filled in the lower depths with a substrate of sand and crushed granite and then laid on the square gray marble blocks one after another. Fitted with the utmost finesse by artisans imported from Italy in the cold bellies of military cargo planes, a score of the oldest men on earth brought here to build a cobbled pathway for fighter jets and finish it off as smooth as glass. While they were at it they rebuilt parts of the World War II memorial to support a network of arrestor wires rather than risk the collision of a landing plane with Black Rose headquarters in that grand domed building at the far end of the mall. The old Capitol.

Two men in a black jeep roared up to meet them. The driver up front indistinguishable from the fighter pilot or any of the six men who’d greeted the helicopter or the helicopter pilot himself. As if they’d all been made on the same assembly line. Seated directly behind him was an august old gentleman, bright of eye and upright as a flagpole, wearing a full dress uniform with a peaked service cap. His little steelgray mustache was cut too narrow to hide the least fraction of his delight with the entire world.

The old man’s breast was paved with medals, and they jangled as he leapt from the car. “Henry Weller,” he said. “Welcome to Washington, my boy.” Pumping his hand without letup.

Bainbridge was his name. General Bainbridge. The only five-star general in the entire Black Rose organization and proud of it. “I told that fellow Carmichael we’d make a man out of you,” he said, “and I’m relieved to see we’ve got something to work with.”

The driver kept an eye on the proceedings from behind his sunglasses. Looking as if he weren’t so sure.

Bainbridge didn’t own any part of Black Rose, but he ran it. Ownership was invisible inside the old White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, surrounded by guards and barricades and armored vehicles of all kinds, with rooftop snipers stationed up and down the block for a mile or more in each direction as if the entire city weren’t a fortress already. Bainbridge himself lived in the mansion at Number One Observatory Circle, home for more than a century to a succession of officials of increasing authority. From observatory superintendents on up to Vice Presidents of the United States of America. A place so grand and lovely that not one of them would permit a lesser individual to live in it for long.

They drove there with Weller and Bainbridge side by side in the back, Weller’s old rucksack thrown into the front alongside the driver. The open-roofed jeep making its own breeze and the hot sun beating down and the summer air wet. Bainbridge talking steadily all the way, avid as some paid tour guide. Washington was the most beautiful place Weller had ever seen, far more beautiful than Manhattan with its grim skyscrapers and walled parks. This was a white and open city populated by a race of supermen and fitted ideally to their use. A kind of Elysium. Every lawn a parade ground and every building a palace.

“You’ll be bunking with me,” Bainbridge shouted as they roared up the hill on Observatory Circle and veered into the drive.

“I appreciate your kindness,” Weller said. “But honestly, if you can just point me toward the gear I need and send me on my way—”

The jeep stopped abruptly and Bainbridge sprang out of it. “We’ll see to that in due time, son. Right now let’s get you to your quarters.”

For all of its grandeur, the house was spartan inside. Whitewashed plaster walls and hard furniture. Faded photographs of presidents and generals on the walls in the barest of frames. Marble floors and hardwood floors and linoleum floors all polished alike. There wasn’t a shred of comfort to be had unless you redefined comfort. At the top of the front staircase was a monkish cell with another identical monkish cell right beside it, each one containing a small bureau and a straightbacked chair and a writing desk squared underneath a screened window. A clock on the desk and a cot against one wall made up drumtight, with white cotton sheets and a scratchy wool army blanket in spite of the jungle heat that blew in through the window. Mosquitoes buzzing against the screen. Over the head of the bed not a crucifix but a photograph.

Weller took off his ball cap and mopped his brow with the back of his forearm.

“The founding fathers built this city on a swamp,” Bainbridge said. He stepped inside his own door and hung his cap on a peg and stepped back out, not the least bit troubled by the heat. Dry as the sound of his own voice. “Come summertime, we pay the price.”

“I can see that.” Weller tossed his rucksack onto the cot and the cot gave no more than a marble slab. He sat down on it and it still didn’t give. Great. At least he wouldn’t be here for long. “Let’s get started,” he said. “I’m in a little bit of a hurry.”

Bainbridge stood in the open door with his legs spread and his hands folded behind his back. Not moving. Not doing anything except studying Weller and smiling. “I like a man with a sense of urgency,” he said.

“I’ve got that in spades.”

“Good. You’ll do fine.”

Weller took a few things out of his pack and put them on the table. The photograph of himself with Penny and Carmichael. Balled socks and underwear. The Zippo he’d taken from the old man in the bunker. “I guess there’ll be some kind of vehicle involved,” he said.

“We’ve lined up a nice vintage Harley from the motor pool. World War II issue. It goes like a bat out of hell.”