The foyer would normally have been crowded at this time, with guests checking out and conference-goers arriving for seminars and meetings, but apart from the Germans and half-a-dozen cabin crew from some Asian airline, the lobby was mostly deserted. A couple of wet tourists wandered in from the beach with towels thrown over their shoulders, and the glassy, frozen grins of people desperately trying to avoid looking at the yawning abyss that had lately opened up in front of them. It was a look that Jed Culver was becoming used to. His eyes scanned the floor and he spied his driver standing just outside, sneaking in a last-minute cigarette. He’d given the cancer sticks up himself twenty years ago, after successfully representing British and American Tobacco in a suit against one of their many former customers. Or victims, as even the executives called them in private.
Bobby Kua, his driver, was a native Hawaiian, a surfer. Jed shook his head ruefully as he watched the boy suck extra hard on the Marlboro, to drag in every last precious carcinogenic lungful, as soon as he saw the lawyer approaching.
‘I’m telling you, Bobby, you’d be a much better surfer if you gave those things away.’
‘No way, boss,’ Kua said with a smile. ‘I’m already a weapon. Couldn’t get any better.’
He drew one last, long puff before stubbing out the butt and flicking it into a nearby bin. Jed wondered how long it would be before the young man was pinching off his half-smoked butts to finish them later. He made a mental note to buy up a few cartons. Within a week or two, some people would sell their souls for nicotine, he was sure.
‘So where to, boss?’
‘Pearl today,’ replied Culver. ‘We’ll be there most of the day, then out to the Capitol at about three-thirty for a meeting. You could probably get away for an hour or so if you needed to. But I’m on a promise to get back here for drinks. Say, seven.’
‘Got it,’ said Bobby, leading him over to the nondescript white Chevy Aveo from the government fleet. Gas rationing meant that only the smallest, most fuel-efficient cars could be signed out of the pool for official business, while civilian motorists were restricted to just a few gallons a week, which could only be purchased on alternate days. Rationing had quickly become an unpleasant reality that everyone had to deal with. Armed troopers posted at supermarkets and gas stations made sure of that. Appeals to fairness and civic mindedness shortly after the start of the Disappearance had achieved nothing but the rapid emptying of grocery-store shelves and at least a dozen incidents of serious violence, including one macadamia-caramel-popcorn-related multiple homicide at a supermarket on Kalakaua Avenue.
Culver was grateful that he had no responsibility for the rationing system. It had quickly come to challenge the Disappearance as the open wound on talk radio. The first time an American was told by a heavily armed man in combat gear that they couldn’t buy all of the Twinkies they wanted, it tended to come as a deep, existential shock every bit as unnerving as the still unexplained cataclysm back on the mainland. Jed himself had quickly emptied the small bar fridge of liquor back at the hotel and filled it up with emergency food supplies, as soon as he’d noticed the breakfast buffet in the restaurant was looking a bit spare. Frankly, he’d have been much happier if he could have relocated Marilyn and the kids to Pearl Harbor, just in case things got totally out of hand. But they all insisted on staying at the Embassy Suites, and he was reasonably confident of making himself important enough to grab up a safe berth in the event of any European-style uprising.
To that end, he strapped himself into the back seat of the car, with room to spread out his documents, and got to work while Bobby drove him through Honolulu. More shops were closed every day now. In fact, apart from bars and heavily guarded food outlets, there was very little open at all and very few people on the streets. Marilyn was probably going to be disappointed in her search for a new cocktail dress.
Soldiers and cops comprised most of the foot traffic in contrast to the first few days after 14 March, when huge unruly crowds had gathered and surged back and forth, almost like people running without real purpose on the deck of a sinking ship. Together the rationing and curfew systems tended to keep people at home most of the time.
They slowed down to negotiate a large but docile crowd that had gathered at the Fort DeRussy parklands for a food-distribution point run by the army. A dozen trucks were parked in a line before an avenue of olive-drab tents. Soldiers were unloading hundreds of boxes, stacking them in neat piles guarded by colleagues toting rifles. It was still a bizarre, unnatural sight – Americans lined up like victims of a Honduran earthquake to score a bowl of rice or a milk biscuit. Culver pushed the images out of his mind and returned to his papers, making some untidy margin notes on a briefing he had to deliver later that day at a telephone hook-up between the attorneys-general of the surviving states.
Admiral Ritchie was adamant that the armed forces could not continue drifting through the constitutional limbo into which they had been cast. It was not simply a matter of requiring political direction for the course of the hot war they were now fighting in the Middle East. There were security nightmares springing up like poison weeds all over the world, as well as some very basic and uncomfortable questions of sustainability for those forces that remained in existence.
‘How do we keep going?’ Ritchie had asked Jed late last night.
Culver thought the admiral might as well have asked, ‘Why should we keep going?’ He couldn’t imagine what was holding together a fighting force that had nothing to fight for anymore, and increasingly lacked the money to do so.
Immediate survival, he supposed. But if and when the immediate peril was no longer there, what then? A nation of ten million people – that was the rough estimate of living, breathing American citizens left in the world – a nation that small could not sustain a military even a fraction the size of the one it had at the moment. Especially not with most of the country sealed off behind an impenetrable and utterly mysterious barrier. Frankly, Culver doubted whether the area that remained unaffected on the continent was viable in the medium term anyway. He grunted almost imperceptibly as he briefly thought of all those people stuck in Seattle and just across the border in Vancouver. None of them could be certain some natural fluctuation in the event horizon wouldn’t gobble them up in the blink of an eye, although, by that measure of course, nobody on the planet could really feel safe.
You had to wonder how much of the chaos wrapping itself like giant bat wings around the world was down to the effect of that uncertainty rather than the unsettling effect of simply removing at one stroke the massive political ballast represented by America… Oh, screw it. It was undergrad bullshitting, all of it. The only thing that mattered was fixing the problems he could fix, and for now that meant stabilising the remnant power of the United States and securing the immediate future of his family.