fetal position beneath the covers as he watched the closet. If he could save the world, it wouldn’t matter. He could stop her. He could also… escape from her.
Hall swept the covers off and stood. Mary turned in the bed and watched him, but she remained silent.
He felt relief and he felt a calmness, like he was floating in a warm bath. He moved to the closet, and with a final look at the gap beneath the door, opened it and took his uniform from where it hung on the back.
“You’re leaving? I thought you said you would stay the night.”
Hall paused only a moment, then slipped the jacket off the hanger.
“Sorry,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t press any further. He heard her move on the bed, but he didn’t turn around. He thought he should perhaps say goodbye, say it properly, explain everything, but knew that she could be watching, listening. He had to act now, quickly.
Dressed, he picked his cap off the dresser and turned back to Mary. She looked at him with wide eyes that glistened wetly in the dark, and he thought of the blue light that spun in the eyes of Evelyn McHale. And he thought of how he would be free at last.
He said goodbye, said he loved her, and closed the bedroom door behind him.
As Mary turned over, in the gap between the bottom of the closet door and the thick carpet, a blue light shone.
FORTY-ONE
It was cooler in the holding cell, which was a relief. Gone were the bag and the shackles, allowing Nimrod some small comfort, at least.
He couldn’t sleep. He paced the cell, a space hardly more than twelve feet by ten, his eyes on the cement floor, watching the toes of his boots. They were scuffed, and the boots – knee-high riding boots, his particular favorites brought with him from England thirty or more years ago – needed a clean, a wax and polish. He paused in his pacing and examined the toes of the left. The leather was thin, worn. Maybe he needed a new pair. If he ever left the cell.
He began to pace again. How many hours he had been kept locked up, he wasn’t sure, but dawn was just a couple hours away.
He knew his arrest and incarceration was most likely illegal, the charges certainly fabricated, the whole charade engineered to remove him cleanly and without fuss. Rather than a straightforward disappearance, the accusations of Communist leanings and his subsequent public confession would be used to shut him and the Department down, allowing Atoms for Peace to step in and take over the whole operation, lock, stock and barrel. Controlling New York, controlling the Fissure. The Director would have what she apparently needed to enact her terrifying plan: access to the Fissure, unimpeded.
Nimrod paused as someone walked past his cell. The door had a small square window, which was shut, but the relatively thin metal of the cover allowed sound to penetrate the cell admirably. Although he hadn’t been able to see anything through the black bag when he’d been brought in, he imagined the corridors outside the cell swarming with MPs.
Nimrod chewed on a thumbnail. He had to see the President. While it was clear the Director had got to him, the President was a good man and an old friend. And even if he was dazzled by the wonders that Atoms for Peace – the very organization the President had created – could offer him and the country, he would listen, Nimrod was sure of it. Nimrod’s position within the hierarchy of government was unique; his influence spread far and wide. He could not be ignored.
However, time was running out. They would remove him quickly. He doubted there would be a military tribunal – on paper, certainly, records could be created, a transcript composed. But Nimrod knew that the next journey would be to the gas chamber or the electric chair, whichever was available in DC for the federal death penalty.
More footsteps outside. Their volume increased; then they stopped. Nimrod turned. Either it was time to be fed, or this was it. The Department would be no more; he would be executed while federal agents and MPs massed at the Empire State Building, arrested all agents, consigned every file in the office to sealed secure document boxes for burial in the Nevada desert.
Keys in the door, loud, taking forever. Nimrod thought of the old days, the freedom of flying his airship across the