John Barnes - The Last President

Heather was staring at him, slowly shaking her head. “So your little digs at me about getting carried away and executing him and how much that was senseless, you were just… getting me ready for when you pulled him out of your hat?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She shrugged. “He was one of my closest friends for a long time. A day hasn’t gone by that I haven’t missed him. I think I might even be glad to see him alive. You’d better take me to him. Bambi, would you like to join us for this?”

“Arn and I used to be regulars at the departmental happy hour, back before,” Bambi reminded her. “I guess it’s going to be old home week. Keep our guns or check them at the door?”

“We’ve never allowed weapons near him,” James said. “Well, let me send out some runners.” He thought for a moment. “We’ll need to get the interrogation team together to meet us there; that’s just safety. Then a carriage for us, I guess, we have him in the super-secure wing of Facility 1 and that’s about a mile and a half, unless you want to walk.”

“How about two carriages?” Leslie said. “One for you guys to do old home week in, one for James and I to talk. Because, frankly, we need to talk.”

“I think the budget can stand that,” Heather said. “Considering there’s about to be no government of the United States, and we run on its credit.”

James nodded and headed for the messenger’s bench at the other end of the building.

“Besides,” Heather said, “I might as well spend it now before it goes away.”

Bambi smiled. “Spoken like a true bureaucrat. You really think you’re going to lose your budget?”

“Oh, hell, yeah. One big funding source is going to disappear when the Tempers turn into the Christian States of America. Who knows how long the PCG will want to keep funding us, especially once Allie wakes up and finds out I prevented her from being President?”

Bambi snorted. “Jeez. Our old office politics are now running the continent. Well, look, hon, I’m a duchess. You were a pretty good bureaucrat, and I bet you’ll make a pretty good vassal. And one advantage of being a duchess is, le budget, c’est moi .”

“Well,” James said, closing the carriage door, “You said you wanted to talk.”

“Yeah.” She reached out and grasped his wrist. “James, I—shit. I don’t have any idea what I feel. I mean, he almost killed me.”

“He did. For what it’s worth, he’s gone after me or one of the others with his bare hands, or silverware he stole, or a piece of broken plate or a garotte he tore out of his underwear. More times than I can count. About a third of the time he’s plain old, gentle, nerdy, numbers-and-graphs-loving Arnie. Another third, he’s a treacherous evil snake of a liar, but very persuasive, and he sounds just like he does when he’s himself. And the last third… well, no predicting, but he’s tried to kill us, sometimes by biting out our carotids, sometimes by sounding as reasonable and mellow as a stoned kindergarten teacher. And he jumps from one to the other and there’s no warning.”

“Yeah. But… okay, whether you feel good about it or not, this is about me.” She sighed, and played with Wonder’s ears; he panted and looked up at James.

“Yeah,” James said, “I knew it was going to be.”

“ Why did you save Arnie Yang’s life? I mean, James, just this once, I’ll admit I know how you feel about me, that you haven’t changed, you’re still forcing yourself to be the best friend I could ever wish for, but that’s not what you want—”

He sat up stiffly, looked out the window, and kept his voice very flat. “You’re right, we don’t talk about all that.”

“But—”

“You wanted me to let him be hanged, as revenge for what he almost did to you? Don’t think I didn’t consider that. I would honest to god have enjoyed hearing that cable snap his neck. Because he tried to frame you, because he betrayed Ecco, because he fooled me, because he smiled right into the faces of people who thought he was their friend and were trying to be good friends to him. Ten million reasons I would have liked to see him dangling dead.

“But I did it all, anyway, instead. I arranged with MaryBeth to handle the switch, and got the note from Allie that we could be sure would trigger a Daybreak seizure. Then when he had the attack, MaryBeth and I took him to the infirmary. We only needed a couple of minutes because we had a prisoner we hadn’t logged. Deb and Larry Mensche knew a guy about Arnie’s size and coloration, who had been a Daybreaker, and killed his own family while he was under it, and didn’t want to live. They were waiting with him in the infirmary, and they had already dosed him up on barbiturates and got him all weepy and sleepy and hooded him, and that’s the man we took back out to ride in the wagon to his hanging.

“Meanwhile Jason and Beth took Arnie Yang to the high security section we had just set up in Facility 1; there are about a dozen high-level deeply infected Daybreakers in there at any given time, and the roster tends to change pretty fast because what we do to interrogate them, um, uses them up.”

“Kills them?”

“If they don’t find a way to kill themselves, or die of a related accident, or turn into gaping, drooling mannequins.” He rubbed his face. “It’s one hell of a job for an ex-librarian to take on, but there was no one else for it.”

“Did it have to be done?”

“Yeah, I still think so. If we’d won, anyway, I think it would have been justified. Anyway, it was the fake Arnie that went back out on the gurney, up the steps, and down the drop. Nobody saw his face till MaryBeth and I took his hood off, and you know, with the weights on his feet and using aircraft cable on such a long drop, we had turned his face into one big swollen bruise, with a big black tongue sticking out and red eyeballs bulging like Ping-Pong balls. No one who had been friends with Arnie was going to look closely. We let them have one glimpse, then MaryBeth signed the death certificate, I fed fake-Arnie head down into the incinerator—supposedly to prevent his grave becoming a pilgrimage site—and we made it work. That’s how we did it, and no, at the time, I didn’t tell you about it. You’d just been released from death row yourself and you were drinking and partying like all of a sudden there was a tomorrow.”

“When I’ve been scared, I like a lot of sex. And I’d never been so scared before.”

“I know. I understood that, Leslie. We’ve been friends a long time.”

“Yeah. I try to keep you from hearing too much about it, or seeing me when I’m that way.”

“I appreciate it. Anyway, the point is, I didn’t hang Arnie, and I decided not to hang Arnie, but it had nothing to do with you. Not that I wasn’t angry enough, just that it made no sense, if I was trying to do my job running an intelligence service. I certainly didn’t save Arnie because I loved him, or forgave him, or wanted to spend time in his company. So I’m sorry but for once in my stupid, infatuated, never-learn life, this wasn’t about you.”

Leslie leaned forward, looking at him with an expression he couldn’t read, astonishment, maybe, even shock. “James, James—shit, I’m handling this so badly, I was trying to be careful not to hurt you. I just wanted to say… James, you didn’t have to keep it secret from me, you don’t need my forgiveness because there’s nothing to forgive, I understand , James.”

She reached over and clutched his arm; he looked at her hand as if it had magically appeared there. “James,” she said again. “What I wanted to tell you was… of course you had to keep him alive, of course you had to have him for interrogation, because you are running an intelligence organization, with very fucking likely the fate of civilization at stake, and he’s the richest possible source of intelligence about the enemy you could have, the senior analyst from our own side infected by Daybreak.