Chapter 61

61

After three days of interrogation by the FBI and agents from the National Security Agency, as well as six hours of intense grilling by the Secretary of the Navy, Senator Gilmonn had been set free from his office and apartment in Long Beach, California. He had ordered his chauffeur to drive east.

Nobody had been able, or particularly willing, to hang anything on him, though the trail of the arrow or monkey or whatever from the U.S.S. Saratoga to his car was reasonably well defined. Given more than a mere two and a half months of investigation and second-guessing, he might have been in some trouble, and the captain of the Saratoga relieved of his command, but things had changed markedly now in these United States. It was a different nation, a different government—functioning to all intents and purposes without a head. The President, under impeachment, was still in office but with most of his strings of influence and therefore power severed.

Gilmonn's incarceration, which might have been pro forma half a year ago, was now simply out of the question.

For all that, what had they accomplished? They had killed Lieutenant Colonel Rogers and perhaps thirty Forgers who had refused to vacate the desert around the bogey. They had blown the bogey into scattered pieces. Yet few involved in the conspiracy believed, now, that they had done anything to even postpone, much less remove, the sentence of death placed on the Earth.

He stood on the sand near the gravel road that passed within two miles of the site of the disintegrated bogey, binoculars hanging on a leather strap from his neck, face streaming with sweat under the brim of his hat. The white limousine that he had hired with his own money waited a few yards away, the chauffeur impassive behind his dark glasses and blue-black uniform.

Army and government trucks passed along the road every few minutes, some bearing radiation stickers; many of those outward bound, he knew, carried fragments of the bogey. He was not privy to what they were finding. Basically, his presence was tolerated, but now that the conspiracy had accomplished what virtually everybody wanted, those directly involved, while not charged, were being shunned. Scapegoats might be too strong a word . . . and it might not be.

Gilmonn unabashedly cursed Crockerman for having forced them all into an untenable and illegal no-man's-land of circumventions and conspiracies.

And still, deep in the Earth, what some—mostly geologists—had called "the freight trains" and others "bullets" rumbled toward their rendezvous. They could not be traced anymore, but few doubted they were there. The end might be a matter of days or weeks away.

Gilmonn entered the limousine's rear door and poured himself a Scotch and soda from the dispenser. "Tony," he said, slowly twirling the glass between the fingers of his right hand, "where do you want to be when it happens?"