Coach Vern Barkum frowned up at Diacono from behind his desk. "Jesus, Frank, I can't give you next week off. You haven't given me enough notice."
"Yeah, I realize this is short notice, but we've got about as little pressure this time of year as we ever have." Frank delivered this very casually; his voice carried no insistence or urgency.
"I know that! What I'm saying is that I have to retain control here. I can't have my staff flying off in every damn direction on the spur of the moment."
Frank nodded. "Of course you can't. You're absolutely right. I'd feel that way too if I were you."
Barkum's reaction to his request had been expected. It wasn't that he was protective of his authority; his staff respected him, and he knew it. But he had a thing about order and schedules.
"Why don't we size up the whole leave situation," Frank went on. "August to Christmas week is out of the question, of course, and so are May and most of April. June is better than July, and March is better than February. But January is ordinarily okay, once the recruiting charts are done, and my work on them is. So we've got June as the best month, with March and the rest of January probably next.
"And I'd really a lot rather have the rest of January," he went on, "starting tomorrow."
Barkum grunted. Ah well, why not? he thought. He looked at Diacono, then grinned. "You got a girlfriend that wants to get away from the winter weather and visit Mexico City."
Frank shrugged.
"Okay, go ahead, but don't ask for an extension. I want you here in February so I can call on you to help close any kids we got hanging fire. You're the only big-name NFL veteran I've got."
Frank grinned. "I know," he said. The two men matched grips on it, then Frank turned and left, closing the door behind him.
Barkum stood looking at the closed door, still smiling, but rueful now. " 'I know,' " he mimicked. "Cheeky bastard." The man had to be in love, Barkum decided; he'd been bright-eyed and grinning all day, acting like the world was his oyster. And the line about Diacono's pickup breaking down had probably been pure bullshit.
Diacono strode down the hall to the training room, and to Lewis Quahu's office. Again the door was open, and again he closed it behind him.
"Hey, Lew," he said quietly.
"Yeah?"
"I want to thank you again for getting Vic Merlin's number for me. I spent the weekend with him and some other people, and we visited Sipapu.
"There really is a spirit there, you know."
"Is that right?" Quahu said solemnly, then unexpectedly grinned. Frank wasn't sure he'd ever seen Quahu really grin big before. He smiled lots of times, and he had great teeth, but grinning wasn't something he did much, at least in public.
"And the spirit really talked to us," Frank continued, "in words as clear and real as yours and mine here in this office. It made a fantastic weekend."
Quahu's eyes looked him over. "I believe you. You've changed. I could see you were different during staff meeting this morning. Talking with a kachina could do that."
Diacono nodded, pleased but suddenly a little self-conscious. "Anyway, I wanted to thank you and tell you how well it worked out. Oh, and don't mention this to anyone. I had to lie to the boss about why I wasn't here yesterday."
"Got it," said Quahu.
Frank opened the door, threw Quahu a salute, and went back out. He pulled his jacket on as he strode down the hall, then left the building. The most recent snow was slumping in the bright sunshine, and melting progressively back from the sidewalks. Getting into his pickup, Diacono backed out of his reserved parking slot.
He'd pick up a few hundred in cash at the bank, he decided. There were always places that wouldn't accept credit cards. After that he'd take care of a few things around the apartment and go give Bill and Sharon a quick update: he'd driven back in the predawn hours and hadn't talked to them yet. Then he'd head back for the desert and the Merlins.
Miki Ludi stood on the sundeck in the night, the wooded slope falling away beneath. Marine air had moved in over the Los Angeles Basin, and the hills and low mountains that bordered it, making the air soft and moist, hiding the sky with low clouds. It was dark, for the city, with a feeling of privacy, but she also had a vague sense of something soon to happen.
Psychically she examined the vicinity and picked up no intruding awareness. Without turning on a light, she went back into her room, her eyes, catlike, seeing as well as needed. She felt there was something she needed to know, but she had no inkling of what.
She did, however, have an approach to finding out. Opening a drawer, she took out a lighter and lit a stout candle on her dressing table. That done, she slipped out of her clothes and, lean-limbed, assumed a lotus position on a small cushioned platform, fixing her eyes on the flickering flame. They stayed there, their only movement the flame reflected on them. Anyone watching might have assumed she sought samadhi in the manner of a yogin. Actually, Miki Ludi had no interest in any universal oneness. With basically ethical motives she sought psychic power, and had made significant progress. She was unorthodox in her search, and less eclectic than experimental.
She had read widely, from Manley P. Hall to Castaneda to Aleister Crowley, from Yogananda to Leif Haller, and thence, briefly, to the various journals of parapsychology. But instead of choosing one of the established approaches and following it, she had experimented. That in itself was not so remarkable, but in most such cases, the approach fails to produce much advancement. Miki Ludi was an exception; she seemed to be guided by something within her, as if she already knew, as if she was an amnesiac, her efforts simply an aid to remembering. And if she still stood well short of what she wished to be, she was nonetheless exceptional in more than her beauty and business acumen.
Thus, after a minute or so her focus changed, her attention open to whatever would come, yet aligned with her intention, which was to know what had been nudging her psyche this evening.
Results from this approach were seldom extravagant. Ordinarily she would remain semi-entranced—not until something dramatic or explicit happened, but until she felt that she was done. Later, perhaps next morning in the shower, or at the salon, she would find that she knew what she needed to know—or more often, did what she needed to do, perhaps for little or no apparent reason. In such instances, she was wise enough not to manufacture rationales. She seemed to know naturally that real wisdom is correct action, or the contemplation of it, and that knowledge and understanding are only substitutes, available for use in wisdom's absence, or backups to explain with.
But this evening before the flame, as sometimes happened, she also pulled in pictures and sensations. She saw her sister-in-law in a room with other people. The room they were in was fairly large, with a high ceiling, exposed beams, and a rough wooden floor partly covered with small rugs. The young police sergeant was there with a cast on his arm. She also recognized Olaf Sigurdsson's tall frame.
The others were strangers to her. One was a large man, heavily muscled and, to her, physically attractive. There was also an older man, wiry and bearded, and a small middle-aged woman, red-haired, with eyes that marked power.
There was no sound with this picture, although its people were talking and occasionally gesturing. She felt a certain communion with them, and wished she knew what was going on.
Miki was too wise to strain for more, though. Simply, she watched their conference—she knew this was more than ordinary conversation—and waited for whatever further might come to her. Then something began to pull her attention, and after a moment the room was gone and she was looking at semidarkness. She saw now a different room, lit only by something like a very large television screen. The screen showed the room and conference she had just watched—showed it clearly.
Watching the screen was a squat, fat, aging man, naked and of extraordinary ugliness. She could feel his power. The chair he sat on might have been plexiglass, and looked like some strange, transparent, molded circuit board. Its single arm made her think of a luxurious classroom desk, but it had a keyboard and control levers as well as a writing surface. The chair in turn stood on a low pedestal—a housing that gave no suggestion of its contents but had an insulated cable leading to the meter-wide viewscreen.
After a moment, it seemed to Miki that she was perceivable to this troll, should she catch his attention, and that that would be dangerous. Indeed, a central part of the experience was its sense of danger, as if she found herself in a grizzly's cage with the grizzly momentarily looking the other way. With that realization, the strange room was gone and she was back in her own. But somehow she knew that her act of disconnecting had been noticed, and that another visit might give her location away.
The emotion of fear was foreign to Miki Ludi, and rarely visited her, but her shiver now was not from cold. Unfolding her legs, she got up, snuffed out the candle, and in the darkness got ready for bed. This night's experiences were something she needed to sleep on. Tomorrow she might know what, if anything, to do as a follow up.
John Sordom liked it best when things were on the line—when it was time to handle hell out of something. Usually he found it exhilarating, but not this evening. As soon as Shark had assigned him to work with Hardman, he'd had a conference with the gridman. Immediately after that he'd phoned Manny Goldner in Casa Grande, Arizona, and made a verbal contract: Manny was to meet him at the airport in Winslow, Arizona, that same night, with all the material necessary.
It had taken a dozen rings to waken Manny, who'd been up all the night before, and through the day until evening, on a job south of the border. Sordom had made sure that Manny was awake enough to get the instructions accurately, and made him summarize it all before hanging up.
Manny was a good man who kept busy. He did a lot of commercial blasting for construction contractors, demolition contractors, oil drillers, and increasingly for revolutionaries of one stripe or another in Latin America—anything that required high-priced finesse with explosives. He'd worked for Sordom before.
This job didn't require that much finesse, but Sordom liked working with real pros. And besides having all the necessary materials on hand, Goldner kept an old Curtis Travelair around that would be just right for the job. It was unobtrusive and could maintain altitude at walking speed.
Sordom had never been to Winslow. He'd selected it because its airport could accommodate his light jet and because it was a small town only 130 air miles from Merlin's place. Before taking off, he'd called in Hardman to guide his pen in locating Merlin's place on one of the large-scale maps Sordom carried in his cockpit. There shouldn't be any problem locating it from the air; there weren't any other buildings around for miles, Hardman had assured him, and then had given him a mental image of Merlin's place.
Now the lights of Winslow appeared on the southwestern horizon. Sordom evaluated the country, what he could see of it by the light of a concave moon: high desert, barren as hell, with a little snow in arroyos and on steeper north slopes where the winter sun didn't get at it. The town didn't look like much, either—the asshole of the world, good place to test an H-bomb. He made his approach and landed, and as he taxied toward the parking area, saw a Travelair parked there. It had to be Manny's; there were damned few Travelairs left in the world anymore.
The little one-room terminal hunched dark and empty beneath the winter sky. The tin shed that housed airport services had a light in the window at one end—the office. A man in coveralls and heavy jacket was walking out to meet him, signalling with an arm where he wanted Sordom to park. Leaving the slim, poker-faced young Navajo to set the chocks and refuel the jet, Sordom walked to the shed, the relevant maps folded in the front of his jacket, and went into the little office.
Manny Goldner was inside, frowzy-headed and gray-faced, drinking coffee from a cup that read "Charlie" on the side.
"Change your name?" asked Sordom.
Goldner's broad features frowned in puzzlement.
"Your cup says Charlie on it."
Goldner looked at the name, then at Sordom. "The Indian lent it to me."
"You fit to fly? You look like hell."
"Yeah, I'm fit to fly," Goldner said truculently. "If you don't like my looks, I'll just find me a motel here and sleep for about twenty hours. The five hours you woke me out of, and three hours the night before last, is all the sleep I got for three days."
Sordom eyed him; the man was running on benzedrine. "You sure you're fit to fly?"
"I told you, didn't I? I just ain't fit to associate with, is all." He patted the pocket of his flight jacket. "You got cigarettes? I run out."
Sordom took an elegant, gold-plated cigarette case out of his own flight jacket and offered one of his Gauloises. The case always impressed the people he dealt with, even the drug kings with big money. It was partly that he handled it as if he was born to it. And if anyone ever decided to jump him for it, their education would be quick. It would also be terminal unless Sordom had some reason to spare them; he was enormously competent in matters like that—entirely aside from being virtually impossible to take by surprise. These traits had been the principal expression of his psi talent throughout his youth until the Seven Lords had worked on him: His actions almost always anticipated and negated what the enemy was going to try next.
He'd been highly trained and deadly before he left Nam. Under The Lords he'd become twice as deadly, and learned to associate with captains of commerce, governments, and the underworld without necessarily coming across as a killer.
Of course, The Seven had made a few other alterations in him, too—as few as necessary. Implanting was a limited technique with the technology allowed in the Tikh Cheki Matrix, even in hands as skilled as those of the Seven Lords. It commonly caused some irrational and unpredictable side responses, not so much to the implanted triggering phrases but to seemingly irrelevant words or situations.
So he'd been only sparingly tampered with, and had proven a very stable, rational, and ruthless operator. And loyal—that was the key. He believed implicitly that he, with Shark and Gracco and Hardman, would run this sector the next cycle, if they saw this one through successfully. And he would never reject the broad purposes imprinted on him by The Seven.
He watched Goldner take one of the cigarettes and light up. The man's hands were steady enough, and his eyes weren't that much too bright. He'd do, Sordom decided; he'd have to. And given his lack of sleep, he was probably more fit to fly with the bennies in him than without them.
"You ready to take off?" Sordom asked.
"Sure. I got my tanks topped off when I got here. You said twenty thou, right?"
"Right."
"I still ain't rich enough that I can say no to twenty thou just for a few hours' sleep. But when I get to bed next time, I'm going to unplug the fucking telephone." He raised his mug. "You going to have a cup before we take off?"
"No. We've got to get this job done muy pronto. Finish your coffee and let's get going. It's more than an hour's flight in that relic."
Goldner shrugged. Sordom shouldn't call the Travelair a relic; it was he who suggested they use it. Then, finishing the half-cold coffee with one movement, Goldner nodded, ready. The young Navajo came back in, logged the jet, received its keys from Sordom, and the three men walked out together.
Sordom stood with his shoulders hunched in the cold night while the Indian unfastened the tie-downs and Goldner started an abbreviated preflight check. The temperature couldn't be much above zero, Sordom thought; it was bullshit to have such cold weather in a desert. Deserts should be like Phoenix in the winter, or like early autumn in Chicago—maybe a little frosty now and then, but never really cold.
Then Goldner nodded to him, and the two of them got into the aircraft. Sordom's eyes took in the cabin, finding only a cardboard box with a parachute attached. "Is that the bomb?" he asked.
"That's him."
Sordom took a small pocket flashlight from his jacket and put its beam on the box. The cardboard was heavy, the box reinforced with wide bands of strapping tape.
"What's it doing with fuse on it?" he asked.
"I didn't have any impact detonators, so I rigged it with fuse."
"Shit, Manny! I didn't hire you to go out with some kind of half-assed mickey mouse bomb!"
"Look," said Goldner tiredly, "don't get your back up. You said this was a big rush job—you needed it done tonight. And it was a lot quicker to cut off forty seconds worth of fuse and fasten a cargo chute to the charge than to rig up a safe detonator. We'll drop it from seven hundred feet, and she'll blow about five seconds after she hits."
Why hadn't he just put a blasting cap on it and let that blow it on impact? Sordom wondered. But Manny knew what he was doing; he was one of the top professionals. Sordom eyed the bomb with that point of view and felt a little better about it. It was big—maybe eighty pounds. That ought to do the job with something to spare, even with adobe.
Then something else struck him about it. "That's not the color of fuse! Why didn't you use standard fuse?"
"It came with some goods I picked up in Honduras—French, they told me, but actually it's Russian. That's about all you can get down there unless you run into our own. That's standard color for Russian fuse; I've used it before."
Sordom contemplated it. It didn't feel good to him. But it was Soviet, all right; he recognized it now from Nam. He bent and looked more closely at it.
"Shit, John," said Goldner irritatedly, "there ain't nothing wrong with that fuse; I know what the hell I'm doing. How the hell you think I lived this long if I wasn't careful about things like that? It'll work like a charm. All that'll be left of that ranch house is the cellar. Even if it never had a cellar."
Sordom was still pondering the fuse. "Look!" Goldner said, suddenly angry, "you want to do this tonight or not?"
Sordom straightened and nodded: Manny was the expert. "Let's go," he said.
They stepped into the cockpit and sat down. Goldner flipped the master switch, looked over the instruments, and turned the single engine over. She caught and roared into life. While she warmed up, Sordom went over the maps with him. Then they taxied out and took off.
They were flying about two thousand feet above the canyon as they approached the target. Goldner looked questioningly at Sordom. "Is that it?" he asked.
Mentally, Sordom had already called up the aerial viewpoint image that Hardman had given him. He wished the moon was brighter; it was in the fourth quarter, less than half a disk. He was going to have to call Hardman in to be sure. This was no situation for guessing, and Hardman would be on the grid tonight, even if he was napping.
"Circle," he ordered. Then mentally he called to Hardman and asked the question. The gridman had been awake; it occurred to Sordom, not for the first time, that he would not want Hardman's job. The answer came quickly; the buildings below were the Merlin place.
"That's it," he told the pilot. "Seven hundred feet, you said."
Goldner nodded. Their eyes met. Manny was doing fine, Sordom told himself, just fine, but he'd take over the controls when the job was done and let the man sleep on the way back to Winslow. He gave Goldner the high sign, then, crouching, went back to the bomb.
He had donned a parachute; now he tightened its straps. He'd be leaning out the door on the bombing run. Sordom opened the door and fastened it back, then attached the static line of the cargo chute to a cable overhead.
The long banking turn took them well out over the desert basin again. When they had straightened, they were aimed up the canyon at what appeared to be about seven hundred feet. Goldner cut their speed to about eighty miles an hour, and Sordom slid the heavy box to the wind-whipped opening in the plane's side.
Leaning out, the cold air snatching at his face, Sordom saw the cluster of buildings and box elders farther up the canyon. It would be pointless to make a drift chute pass, he decided. They were lower than the ridges that walled the canyon, down out of any crosswinds, and Manny had told him the wind was negligible anyway.
He picked up the little plunger on the fuse's end that would ignite it. The buildings rushed toward them, and Manny cut back the throttle, the airspeed dropping to sixty-five or seventy. Sordom's eyes were glued to the buildings. He pushed the plunger, and for just a split second, as the "fuse" snapped angrily into life, he knew what was wrong with it: it was primacord!
The plane blew apart in a tremendous explosion. Back in Dallas, Kurt Hardman screamed. It even wakened Shark in New York. John Sordom's psyche was too shocked to do anything as his body disintegrated; it would be days or weeks before he regained a disembodied awareness. Manny Goldner was just as dead but far less devastated, because for him there was not that awful instant of trying to stop the passage of time, that terrible, futile effort to hold away the explosion.
It woke up everyone in the ranch house and broke every window in the place, but that was the extent of the real damage. The CIA agent who had craftily introduced primacord, disguised as Russian fuse, into the terrorist channels of revolutionary Central America would never have imagined this particular scenario.