POTUS.
“I loved him,” the president said. “And now …How . . .?” She stared at the Secret Service agent stepping briskly to her and
said, “Are you arresting me?”
The agent froze. The audience stopped breathing.
Cameras zoomed in close on her face and what looked like a
single tear rolled from her eye. It seemed dark, for a tear, almost as
if she was weeping blood. Even with high definition cameras it was
impossible to make out that the dark tear was a rush of platooned
nanobots.
“Madam President, I’m—” the agent said.
The president stepped to him and suddenly shoved him back.
He stumbled, tripped backward, and landed hard. Morales squatted
beside him and reached inside his jacket.
Two other agents were rushing now, not knowing what was happening, just that something sure as hell wasn’t right.
When the president stood up she was holding a pistol. “Jesus Christ,” Gastrell said.
The agents froze. In all their training, there was nothing about
the POTUS wielding a gun.
Morales walked calmly back to the podium. The gun was in her
hand. She looked out over the audience and at the world beyond and
said, “I don’t know why.”
Then as a chorus of screams echoed, she raised the gun to her
temple and squeezed the trigger.
Deng Shi had two jobs, one more profitable than the other. On the one hand, he was a shrimper. On the other hand he engaged in a little light smuggling—no drugs, just cigarettes, booze, a bit of tax avoidance really, no harm in it.
He had in his time seen a fair share of strange things in the waters of Victoria Harbor. But what he saw now beat anything.
He steered his bo
at a few degrees to starboard, veering toward the object—no, objects, there were two—in the water. He yelled down to one of his crew to get a grappling hook.
One man with a hook was not nearly enough. It took four strong men and a winch.
Ten minutes later Deng stood amazed and a little awestruck by what looked very much like two men melted together. There was also an elderly woman, but she was practically invisible standing beside the creature—he couldn’t yet quite think of them as humans.
It seemed one single life jacket and the small woman had managed to keep them afloat. Deng spoke no English, and neither the Twins nor Ling spoke any Cantonese. But one of Deng’s deckhands was Vietnamese.
It took an hour to work out the details, for Deng to lend his phone to Charles Armstrong, to wait while he contacted Jindal, and then to get confirmation that half a million U.S. dollars had appeared in Deng’s bank account. The other half of the money would be delivered in cash when Deng put the Twins ashore in Vietnam. There was an Armstrong factory facility there that paid many bribes: the Twins would not need to undergo too many formalities, and there would be no questions.