Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

"To kidnap is against Mexican law." He was turning red in the face, like a cartoon cop. "No matter who kidnaps who."

Marty picked up a phone handset and turned around. "This is an internal matter between two branches of the United States government." He walked up to the man, holding the phone like a weapon, and switched to Spanish. " – You are a bug between two heavy rocks. Do you want me to make the phone call that crushes you?"

The cop rocked back but then held his ground. "I don't know anything about that," he said in English. "A warrant is a simple matter. You must come with me."

"Bullshit." Marty touched one number and unreeled a jack connector from the side of the handset. He clicked it onto the back of his head.

"I demand to know who you are contacting!" Marty just stared at him, slightly wall-eyed. "Cabo!" He gestured, and one of the men put the muzzle of his submachine gun under Marty's chin.

Marty reached back slowly and unjacked. He ignored the gun and looked down into the little man's face. His voice was shaky but firm. "In two minutes you may call your commander, Julio Castenada. He will explain in detail the terrible mistake you almost made, in all innocence. Or you might decide to just go back to the barracks. And not further disturb Comandante Castenada."

They locked eyes for a long second. The cop jerked his chin sideways and the private withdrew his gun. Without another word, the four of them filed out.

Marty eased the door shut behind them. "That was expensive," he said. "I jacked with Dr. Spencer and he jacked with someone in the police. We paid this Castenada three thousand dollars to lose the warrant.

"In the long run, money isn't important, because we can make anything and sell it. But here and now, we don't have a 'long run.' Just one emergency after another."

"Unless somebody finds out you have a nanoforge," Reza said. "Then it won't be a few cops with guns."

"These people didn't look us up in the phone book," Asher said. "It had to be someone in your Dr. Spencer's office."

"You're right, of course," Marty said. "So at the very least, they do know we have access to a nanoforge. But Spencer thinks it's a government connection I'm not able to talk about. That's what these police will be told."

"It stinks, Marty," I said. "It stinks on ice. Sooner or later, they'll have a tank at the door, making demands. How long are we here?"

He flipped open his notebook and pushed a button. "Depends on Ingram, actually. He should be humanized in six to eight days. You and I are going to be in Portobello on the twenty-second, regardless."

Seven days. "But we don't have a contingency plan. If the government or the Mafia puts two and two together."

"Our 'contingency plan' is to think on our feet. So far, so good."

"At the very least, we ought to split up," Asher said. "Our being in one place makes it too easy for them."

Amelia put a hand on my arm. "Pair up and scatter. Each pair with one person who knows Spanish."

"And do it now," Belda said. "Whoever sent those boys with guns has his own contingency plan."

Marty nodded slowly. "I'll stay here. Everybody else call as soon as you find a place. Who speaks enough Spanish to take care of rooms and meals?" More than half of us; it took less than a minute to sort up into pairs. Marty opened a thick wallet and put a stack of currency on the table. "Make sure each of you has at least five hundred pesos."

"Those of us who are up to it ought to take the subway," I said. "An army of cabs would be pretty conspicuous, and traceable."

Amelia and I got our bags, not yet unpacked, and were the first ones out the door. The subway was a kilometer away. I offered to take her suitcase, but she said that would be too conspicuously un-Mexican. She should take mine, and walk two paces behind me.

"At least we'll get a little breathing space to work on the paper. None of this will mean anything if the Jupiter Project is still going September fourteenth."

"I spent a little time on it this morning." She sighed. "Wish we had Peter."

"Never thought I'd say it... but me, too."

THE WOULD SOON FIND out, along with the rest of the world, that Peter was still alive. But he was in no shape to help with the paper.

Police in St. Thomas arrested a middle-aged man wandering through the market at dawn. Dirty and unshaven, dressed only in underwear, at first they thought he was drunk. When the desk sergeant questioned him, though, she found that he was sober but confused. Monumentally confused: he thought the year was 2004 and he was twenty years old.

On the back of his skull, a jack connection so fresh it was crusted with blood. Someone had invaded his mind and stolen the last forty years.

What was taken from his mind corroborated the text of the article, of course. Within a few days, the glorious truth had spread to all of the upper echelons of the Hammer of God: God's plan was going to be fulfilled, appropriately enough, by the godless actions of scientists.

Only a few people knew about the glorious End and Beginning that God would give them on September 14.

One of the paper's authors was safe, most of his brain in a black box somewhere. The academics who had juried the paper had all been taken care of, by accident or "disease." One author was still missing, along with the agent who had been sent to kill her.

The assumption was that they were both dead, since she hadn't surfaced to warn the world. Evidently the authors had been uncertain how much time they had before the process became irreversible.

The most powerful member of the Hammer of God was General Mark Blaisdell, the undersecretary of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Not too surprisingly, he knew his arch-rival, Marty's General Roser, in a casual social way; they took meals at the same Pentagon dining room – "officers' mess," technically, if you can apply the term to a place with mahogany paneling and a white-clad server for each two "messers."

Blaisdell and Roser did not like each other, though both hid it well enough to occasionally play tennis or billiards together. When Roser once invited him to a poker game, Blaisdell coldly said, "I have never once played cards."

What he did like to play was God.

Through a series of three or four intermediaries, he supervised most of the murder and torture that was regrettably necessary to hasten God's plans. He used an illegal jack facility in Cuba, where Peter had been taken to have his memory stripped. It was Blaisdell who reluctantly decided to let the scientist live, while the five jurors were succumbing to their accidents and diseases. Those five scientists lived all over the world, and there wasn't much to immediately link their deaths and disabilities-two of them were in comas, and would sleep through the end of the world-but if Peter showed up dead as well, it could make trouble. He was moderately famous, and there were probably dozens of people who knew the identities of the five jurors and the fact that they had turned down his paper. An investigation might lead to a re-evaluation of the paper, and the fact that Blaisdell's agency had mandated its refusal might attract unwanted scrutiny to other activities.

He tried to keep his religious beliefs to himself, but he knew there were people-like Roser-who knew he was very conservative, and might suspect, given a whisper of fact or rumor, that he was an Ender. The army wouldn't demote him for that, but they could make him the highest-ranking supply clerk in the world.

And if they found out about the Hammer of God, he'd be executed for treason. He would personally prefer that, of course, to demotion. But the secret had been sealed for years, and he would be the last one to give it away. Marty's group was not the only one with pills.

Blaisdell came home from the Pentagon and put on sport coveralls and went to an evening soccer game in Alexandria. At the hot dog stand he talked to the next woman in line, and as they walked back toward the bleachers, he said their agent Ingram had gone to the Omaha train station the evening of July 11th, to pick up and eliminate a scientist, Blaze Harding. Agent and scientist left the station together-security cameras confirmed that-but then both had disappeared. Find them and kill Harding. Kill Ingram if he does anything that makes you think he's on the wrong side.