The Trigger Read online

  'So they could be building these devices now.'

  'It's entirely possible.'

  Turning to Nolby, Breland said, 'It's not clear to me what other options there are, Richard. But I'll listen to your suggestions.'

  'I have none,' Nolby confessed. 'But I find this whole business unsettling - deeply unsettling.'

  '"Unsettling" is a good word,' said Breland. 'It looks to me as if this will "unsettle" a great deal. Dr Brohier, can you stay in Washington for a few days?'

  'Under what terms?' asked Wilman.

  Nolby and Breland exchanged glances.

  'Well - I suppose Richard will insist that I get your signatures on a security oath -' the President began.

  'He can insist all he likes,' said Brohier, interrupting. 'I'm no more trustworthy with my name on a piece of paper, and no less trustworthy without.'

  'Of course,' Breland said. 'But you can understand that -'

  Brohier had no patience for verbal balm. 'Mr President, you don't own me - and no one owns a scientific discovery. You have no business asking me for a commitment when you're not ready to make one yourself. When you decide what you're going to do about what we've told you today, then I'll be ready to decide what I'm going to do. In the meantime, I'll take a room, and give you your few days. But only a few -I hate jostling with tourists, and I hate socializing w'ith lawyers, which sharply limits how long I can stand this town.'

  'Would you be interested in going up to Camp David, Dr Brohier?' asked Breland, unfazed by the remonstration. 'No tourists, and I can have the lawyers driven off before you get there. You're a Vermont man, if I remember correctly - I think you might enjoy the mountain and the woods.'

  'A prison with a view?'

  'Dr Brohier will stay with me at Hollow Oak,' said Goldstein. 'If that's agreeable to everyone.'

  'Given what's at stake, I'd like to see the Secret Service on the grounds,' Nolby said.

  'To watch us, or watch over us?' Brohier said sharply. 'Never mind. Aron, this time, will you let me run the trains?'

  The President looked puzzled, but Goldstein wrinkled his nose in contemplation and allowed, 'Maybe one slow freight.'

  Brohier nodded and looked to Breland. 'We'll be at Hollow Oak.'

  'We'll accept an escort, if you insist on providing one,' Goldstein said with polite cheer. 'But no agents on the grounds,' he added sharply. That's my home, Mr President. And I choose not to live in a fortress. I recommend that notion to you.'

  As a rule, Mark Breland did not have trouble being decisive. Indecision was a fatal flaw in competitive sports, and the purposeful self-assurance he had displayed on the mound was woven into his nature.

  To be sure, his decisions were not always right. But Breland would rather be wrong in a hurry than agonize his way to a state of ambivalence. Soon after his arrival in Washington, his staff and the media alike had taken note of his uncanny ability to quickly size up the options, run out the likely consequences, and make a choice he was willing to live with. Breland's fans, looking at his best decisions, called it 'incisiveness' - his detractors, looking at his worst, called it 'impulsiveness'.

  But the decision facing Breland now was causing the gears of his analysis engine to seize.

  The options were clear enough. The government could take over and build the Trigger for its own purposes, step aside and allow Brohier and Goldstein to take it to market, or draw down the black curtain and bury the secret in the vaults of Yucca Flats.

  But the likely consequences of those choices were frighteningly complex - like trying to look fifty moves ahead in a chess game where each side had five hundred pieces. By the time Goldstein and Brohier left, Breland was feeling humbled by the situation, ill-prepared for the responsibility.

  It was not the first time he had felt that way, but it was the first time in a long time. As a sixteen-year-old high school sophomore, he had found himself the starter in a state tournament game, thanks to a car wreck that injured two of the team's senior pitchers. He hadn't expected to play, hadn't studied the opposing hitters, hadn't been mentally or physically ready, and their top-ranked lineup had stung every pitch that wasn't wild during a half-inning that had gone on forever.

  In the loneliness of a deserted locker room, a teary-eyed Breland had vowed never to be caught out again, never to bring less than his best. Until that day, he had coasted on raw physical talent, never working harder than his notion of 'fun' allowed. From that day forward, he set out to make certain he was always ready for the next level, the next opportunity, the next challenge.

  Breland outworked everyone that fall and winter, made the All-State First Team as a junior, was a first-round draft pick out of high school but took Florida State's scholarship instead of a million-dollar contract. He played four years and graduated with eight SEC records, a degree plus six credits toward a master's, a multimillion-dollar contract, and a nickname - 'Breeze', because he made it all look so easy.

  He never liked the nickname, thinking that it meant they couldn't see the work. It was a nickname better suited to the boy he had been than the young man he had made himself into. But, still, when Breland was called up to the big club after smothering Triple-A for half a season, he was ready. Nothing had changed when the game became politics and the arena Washington - the day he started running, he was ready to win, and the day he won, he was ready to get to work. Even his harshest critics gave him credit for working hard.

  But at that moment, he was his own harshest critic, and the only answer he had for the uncomfortable feeling of looking up at a problem that seemed to dwarf his resources was to work even harder.

  Breland spent most of the afternoon querying the Library of Congress, using the broad-band terminal in his private office. The lead topics were criminology and military history, though industrial chemistry and the Manhattan Project also commanded his attention. By early evening he'd worked up a number of questions he wanted to put to human experts. He picked up his phone, and the parade to the White House gate began.

  Wherever he could, he picked the brains of his visitors without revealing the existence of the Trigger to them. It saved considerable time on a night when most of the men and women Breland summoned spent an hour or more impatiently waiting for him in an anteroom, wondering about the urgency under which they'd been called away from their personal lives.

  When his questions couldn't be posed any other way, Breland spoke speculatively about disarmament without specifying the means, or in airy what-if generalities about the future of weapons technology. Only to his last two visitors of the night did Breland offer a full explanation as preamble.

  His conversation with FBI Director Edgar Mills began just before midnight, and it was after one before Breland finally posed the first of his two questions to the somber-faced former field agent. 'Director, if this technology reaches the hands of ordinary folks, what kind of impact would it have on crime?'

  'Reaches them how? At the price of a new Mercedes, or the price of a cheap suit?'

  'I wouldn't be surprised to see both ends of that scale over the span of a few years.'

  Mills nodded, rubbing his nearly bald pate. 'We had ninety-three bombings last year, not quite two hundred dead. A quiet year, comparatively. At Mercedes prices, maybe we alter the script of fifty of those incidents - and end up with five hundred dead -'

  'What?'

  'Because not every bomber means to kill. But you're still going to have ninety-three explosions, except now some of them are going to take place in the streets at rush hour instead of in a deserted clinic in the middle of the night. And there isn't going to be time to make that phone call and empty that office building. In fact, maybe we end up with three or four bombings a week instead of two, because we won't have as many opportunities to catch some of these people before their timers hit zero, and because this gadget will make competent bomb-builders out of the klutzes - whereas today, sometimes we catch a break because amateurs make mistakes.'

  'But once word starts to g
et around that their own bombs are going to kill them, won't that alter the equation?'

  'I'd expect it to alter the tactics,' Mills said with a frown. There are a lot of ways to deliver a bomb-sized parcel besides walking it up to the front door yourself. Messenger services, UPS, dupes and mules - just find someone who goes where you want the bomb to go and strap it under his car. Now, at middle-class prices, maybe we alter the script of seventy incidents, and end up with two hundred explosions and three thousand dead -'

  'Why?'

  'Because middle class people live and work closer together than the Mercedes people do. From what you say, this device is a detonator that's live all the time, with invisible wires that reach out hundreds of yards - you and your bomb drive past one installed in a mansion's front gate, and you and maybe a security guard or a gardener die. Drive past one installed in an apartment house entryway, and you and maybe a hundred residents die. The simple fact is that the more of these things that are out there, the more carnage we'll have. This thing would make bombs more dangerous for all of us, not just for the would-be bombers.'

  'You don't think people will change their behavior when faced with changed circumstances.'

  Mills sighed. 'Mr President, we've been changing the circumstances for two thousand years, and we still haven't run out of people willing to be criminals.'

  Breland nodded slowly. 'But this device would also make guns less dangerous. How would you balance that against what you've already said?'

  'Oh, that's where the real trouble begins,' Mills said, shaking his head. 'Partly because this is how that device will end up in that apartment house entry in the first place, because people will be thinking about guns instead of bombs. But mostly because there are five hundred million guns in this country, and the people who own them are rather attached to the idea that they're going to work when they need them. The Second Amendment is a high-voltage live wire, Mr President - they don't come any hotter. Don't touch it. If you do, your Presidency will be dead.'

  'You believe that gun owners are equally attached to those fifty thousand shooting deaths a year?'

  'Sir, this may sound cold, but so long as it's someone else's family doing the bleeding, yes. They'll tell you that a third of those shootings are suicides, and whose fault is that? They'll tell you that a third of those shootings are gangboys killing each other, and good riddance to them. And they'll try to tell you that the victims left over are a tragedy, but nothing compared to the number of people who would have been victims if they hadn't been armed, if the bad guys had no reason to be afraid.'

  'Are they right?'

  Mills drank the last of his coffee before answering. 'You know, when I'm visiting East L. A. or the Tenderloin, I think like a cynical old cop, and wonder how I could ever be foolish enough to think we're anything more than savages. And when I'm visiting Sydney or Toronto, I feel like I've discovered a lost world called Civilization, and I wonder why the hell we Americans don't expect more from ourselves. But it really doesn't matter, Mr President, because the gun owners believe they're right. You'll never move them, and they'll never forgive you for trying to take their guns away. Besides - if you can disarm them, they can disarm you, and we can't tolerate that. Not here, not now.'

  Giving a tired little sigh, Breland eased back in his chair. 'Director

  Mills, I was going to ask you for your recommendation on how I should handle this, but I think you've already made that clear -still, if you'd care to summarize -'

  Mills stood, preparing to leave. 'Speaking for the FBI, I'd rather deal with the problems we have now than the ones this technology would bring. Lose it. Destroy it. Don't go there.'

  The President's conversation with his final visitor, National

  Security Advisor General Anson Tripp, was much shorter. Now practiced, Breland was able to condense his briefing to little more than ten minutes. Tripp was able to condense his answers even further.

  'General, if this technology reaches the battlefield -'

  'We'd better be the side that brings it there.'

  'So your recommendation would be? -'

  'Build it, figure out how to beat it, and then throw a blanket over it.'

  'A secret weapon.'

  'Yes.'

  'Wouldn't there be some deterrent value to making it known that we had such a device?'

  'Mr President, there's very little that's more fleeting than a tactical advantage due to a technological advance. There's also very little that's more valuable. If we don't keep it a secret, it won't be available as a weapon.'

  When Tripp left, the anteroom was finally empty. Breland took his unsettled thoughts for a slow walk on the dark South Lawn. Pausing near the fountain, he looked out across the Ellipse at the stout spire of the Washington Monument, which was bathed in a soft yellow glow reminiscent of moonlight. He tried to peer not merely out into the quiet night, but into the shadowed future.

  Breland was in shouting distance of fifty - too old to have delusions about the depth of the footprints he was leaving on Washington. Like most of his predecessors, he had received an intensive education regarding the limits of presidential power. Looking for insights, he often ended the day sitting in his robe in his private office, reading from his collection of presidential memoirs, especially those of the men for whom the tourist maps listed no monuments. He had come to the conclusion that while presidents sometimes missed an opportunity for greatness, no president could create such opportunities - the moment came to them, driven by events outside the White House walls.

  With a certainty he could not explain, Breland knew that his moment was here. In another fifty years, the only remaining trace of his having passed this way would be the consequences of his decision about the Trigger - doubly so if it was the wrong one.

  He told himself he cared less about being remembered well than about doing well, and it was probably true. He had told the voters, 'We can do better,' and now his deeply-held and boldly-stated meliorism would be tested - a test devised by a crotchety genius and delivered by an idealistic tycoon, both of whom clearly viewed him with the skepticism due an unproven youth. To the extent that pride was part of what moved him, it was tied up in not wanting to disappoint those who looked to him to lead - whether they looked like fans, or sounded like fathers.

  But it was far more important to rise to the moment and seize the opportunities it offered. Getting it right mattered. Each life touched dozens more, and the line between living and dying, between healthy and crippled, between joy and fear, could be crossed in an eyeblink. Monuments did not matter. Suffering mattered, because it was real, and so often unnecessary.

  And considered in that light on the deserted White House lawn at three in the morning, Breland realized with weary relief that it was all right if this particular decision took a little longer. He could give himself permission to rest, to close his eyes with the question still unresolved, and take it up again tomorrow. Tomorrow would be soon enough.

  The White House was full of moles, and some of them wore the livery of Secretary of State Devon Carrero.

  Twenty-two years in the diplomatic corps, including high-profile posts in Bonn, Beijing, and Tokyo, had schooled Carrero on the value of information, and instructed him well in where it could be found. Any change in the President's schedule, any unusual visitors, any meetings which did not appear on the daily bulletin provided to the media, were reported swiftly and discreetly to Carrero. Knowing that most of what really mattered in official

  Washington took place out of sight, Carrero studied the city as though he were leading a legation in the capital of a foreign power, ever alert to the kinds of cues which inevitably foreshadowed change.

  The media had dubbed Carrero one of the 'ringers' on Mark Breland's team. Breland had not been in politics long enough to accumulate either friends or obligations in significant numbers, and he had filled out his Cabinet with veteran Capitol insiders who owed their positions not to friendship with the President or even long party loyal
ty, but to their experience, expertise, and connections. That this was considered remarkable said something about the practices and priorities of Breland's predecessors.

  But as a newcomer, Breland was only fitfully observant of inner-circle rituals and etiquette. Carrero had suffered the first few slights in silence. But when he had found himself out of the loop on the Rwandan intervention - with the ambassador to the UN not only holding the spotlight that should have been his, but mishandling the responsibility - Carrero elevated his normal level of inquisitiveness to outright spying.

  'I want to do everything I can to prevent any further embarrassments,' he told his sources and himself. 'Those of us who've been here longer have to help the President succeed. But I can't do that if the President doesn't call on me, and I can't step forward and volunteer if I don't know what's going on.'

  But that grey and windy spring morning, the picture was coming together slowly. The growing roster of visitors was mysterious indeed - among them, two sociologists, a psychologist, the top historian at the Library of Congress, the vice president of the American Chemical Society, the president of the demolition contractor GDI, half a dozen Pentagon types (including a major general in command of the Army War School), and Carrero's own coodinator for counterterrorism, Donald Lange.

  More worried than angry, Carrero called Lange into his office. 'Don, I'd like a report on your meeting with the President,' he said, drawing on his experience to offer a convincing smile and affect a disarmingly casual tone.

  'There wasn't a lot to it, Mr Secretary,' Lange said. 'The President asked me for some facts and figures on trends in international terrorism -'

  'What kind of facts and figures?'

  'Number of active terrorist groups, number of incidents per year, deaths per year - nothing that I don't put into the annual report, except that the annual report's six months out of date. He was very interested in trends and patterns in methodologies, asked me a number of questions about that.'

  'Who else was there?'

  'Most of the time, no one. Chief of Staff Nolby was in and out a couple of times. I saw the secretary of defense on my way in, but he was gone by the time we finished.'