"Destroyer 029 - The Final Death.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

The alarm buzzed at 3:58 a.m. His wife snored on as Vinnie slapped the buzzer off and got up quickly. He dressed rapidly, got his gear together, walked down the hall past Rebecca's room, the sewing room, Victoria's room, picked up his bag in the kitchen, went down the front steps, opened the garage door, started the Monte Carlo, drove off on his hunting trip, and never came back.
Parker Morgan, an old retired architect, was walking his dog, an old retired bloodhound, in the woods around his home.
He loved the trees in the winter, standing out starkly in the cold clear air. Morgan broke
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off a dead branch from a fallen limb and threw it with all his strength.
The dog puffed laboriously after the stick, up over a small rise and out of sight. Parker Morgan watched his own breath condense and soon the dog came back, the twig in his teeth, two white splashes of carbon dioxide puffing out his nostrils.
Morgan kneeled down and the dog planted his paws on the man's knee and stomach, waiting for the branch to be taken and thrown again. Morgan took the stick, stood up, and then frowned.
On his knee and stomach were two bright red pawprints. He looked at the dog who quivered with anticipation. The dog's four paws were red. The old architect examined the dog but could find no cut or injury.
"C'mon, boy, show me where the stick was." He started moving up the hill, the dog dancing around his side.
Morgan stopped when the hard frozen ground gave way to a patch of cold, moist earth. He touched the ground. His fingertips came up red. He smelled, then touched his tongue to his fingers, hoping desperately for the taste of berries. It was blood.
Parker Morgan stared at his hand. A small red drop splattered onto the bridge of his nose from above. He looked up in surprise, and saw trouser legs hanging down from the tree branch over his head. His eyes continued rising, until he stared into the empty sockets of the skeleton in bloody hunter's clothing.
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America's quadrennial exercise in civility had just ended and the country had a new President.
All around Washington, D.C., the last few moments of the inaugural ceremonies were like a starter's pistol, marking the beginning of a string of parties that would culminate later that evening in a dozen or more formal balls.
But the new President of the United States was not yet party-bound. Instead, he sat in one of the private offices of the White House, facing the former President across a large wooden coffee table, sipping lukewarm coffee from a pair of white paper cups.
The new President was on the edge of his chair, uncomfortable because there were no aides or Secret Service men in the room. But the former President slouched back on the sofa, his feet crossed under the coffee table, his balding, moose-jawed head looking in repose for the first time the new President could remember.
"This office is yours now," the balding man said, bitterly munching a canned macaroon. "The world is yours now and you have to learn to use it."
The new President shifted a little bit, coughed, and said dully, "I'm gonna try my best." He had taken speech lessons once to get rid of the Southern accent but they hadn't taken and his speech still was marked by the soft slurred vowels of the South.
"I'm sure you will," the former President said. "We all do." He nonchalantly pulled his feet out from under the table to rest them on
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top of the wooden surface, but he caught the rim and overturned his container of coffee.
Some of the liquid splattered onto the rug from the table and the balding man knelt down by the couch and with his pocket handkerchief sopped up the coffee from the rug and then blotted the table dry. He threw the handkerchief in a wastepaper basket.
"You know what's going to be the nicest thing about not being President any more? It's moving into a different house where we're going to have linoleum on the floor and washable indoor-outdoor carpeting, so when I spill a frigging cup of coffee, it can be wiped up with a paper towel, and I don't have to worry about some commission telling me 10 years later that I destroyed a national rug treasure."
"I guess you didn't ask me here to talk about rugs," the new President said.
"Very perceptive," the older man said drily. "No, I didn't. You remember, in one of our debates, I said the President had to keep options open. Because he was the only one with all the information available to him?"
"What debate?" asked the new President.
"What the hell difference does it make? I don't know. The one where I made the stupid mistake and you spent all your time not answering questions. Anyway it doesn't matter. I asked to meet with you now to give you some of that inside information that only the President knows. Some of the duties of the job that you won't find out about listening to Congress or the New York Times, the bastards."
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The new President sank back into the soft chair. He nodded. "Yes sir, I'm listening."
"Do you remember that convention that had all those people killed in Pennsylvania?" The former President waited for a nod. "Well, there was never any question about what killed them. They were poisoned."
"Poisoned? By whom?" asked the new President.
"I'll get to that. They weren't the first cases-either, but they were the most serious ones. Before that, for months, we were picking up reports of big groups of people getting sick. A party here. A wedding reception there. A church outing. Well, we put the medical boys on it right away, and they nailed it down quickly. It was poison. But the problem was that they didn't know what kind of poison or how it was administered."
"Why was nothing ever said about this?" asked the new President. "I don't remember ever reading. . . ."
"Because you can't run the government of 220 million people out on Page One. Not unless you're willing to risk wild panic that you can't control. What do you do? Tell millions of people that someone out there's trying to poison all of you but we don't know who or how or why, now go to sleep and don't worry about it? You can't do that. Not and try to find any answers to those questions. Just listen, will you please? So there were all those poisonings but nobody died and it didn't seem like the end of the world when our guys couldn't find out the cause of the poison. And then came that business in
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Philly and all those people dead. And that made it something else. More serious."
"I'm surprised at you. I was briefed by the FBI and the CIA and all the federal agencies and departments and I was never told a word of this," the new President sniffed. "I'm surprised they withheld it from me."
"They didn't withhold anything. They just didn't know about it was all. Now let me finish. So after all the deaths in Pennsylvania, we had scientists come up with a vaccine that could offset the poison."
"Well, why haven't you given it to the American people? I can't understand any of this. This delay. This deception."
"We tried to give it to all the American people. Remember the swine-flu program?"
The new President nodded.
"Well, there's no such thing as swine flu. We invented that just to have a reason to inoculate the whole country against this poison. And then the goddam press shot down the swine-flu program with their harping about a few meaningless statistical deaths. So our asses are back in the sling." The big balding man rubbed his hand over the top of his head and scratched himself behind the right ear.
"Well, then make it mandatory that everyone gets a shot," the new President said. "Put it into law."
The ex-President smiled thinly. "Can you imagine the roar about trampled rights? After Watergate? The lawyers would break down our doors and string us all up as fascists. And I just don't think you can go ahead and tell
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the American people that there's a deadly poison somewhere in their food chain and we don't know where it is. Especially since there haven't been any more deaths since that convention. Maybe whatever it was passed off, and it's over now."
The smaller Southerner looked trapped in his chair, as if the full responsibility of his job was weighing on him for the very first time.
"What do we do?" he asked.
"What do you do?" answered the ex-President. "You're the President now."
"One thing I don't understand. A minute ago, you said the FBI, nobody, knew anything about this. How'd you manage that?"