The Siege of Eternity

Some people, especially the people who made their living as the world's stand-up comics, took it to be a joke. It didn't take some of the comedians very long to identify the scarecrow as the one from Oz, and not much longer than that to give Identities to the seven others. They mixed up their children's classics, to be sure. But the one with the beard they called Doc, the dumbly smiling one Dopey, the drowsy-eyed one Sleepy: why, they were the Seven Ugly Space Dwarfs, though there was no Snow White anywhere to be found.

Not everyone was amused. The world's terrorist crazies were getting particularly active around then, and some people thought the message might have something to do w/'tft that. Others took it to be a warning of some modern-day Armageddon about to happen, or perhaps an advance notice of the Second Coming of Christ.

It wasn't any of those things, though. As it turned out, it was a whole lot worse.

CHAPTER ONE

Uptown traffic was terrible and there was an abandoned vehicle on the Henry Hudson Elway at Sixty-first Street that everybody was afraid to approach until the bomb squad got there. Colonel Morrisey's driver had to detour all the way over to Broadway. It was snowing enough to slow everyone down, and the traffic went from terrible to worse.

10 A.M. Traffic Advisory

The New Jersey Turnpike is mined between Exits 14 and

15 southbound. One lane is open during mine-removal activities.

An abandoned car, presumed booby-trapped, is in the

northbound Henry Hudson Elevated Highway at Sixty-first

Street and traffic is diverted.

The Lenni-Lenape Ghost Dance Revengers have declared a free-fire zone within four hundred meters of the World Trade Center from 4:00 to 4:30 P.M. today.

No other warnings currently in effect.

Fortunately they wouldn't be coming back that way, because a plane would be waiting near the yacht basin on the river. But the woman who was on her way to arrest, or rearrest, her favorite agent was getting short-tempered. Her name was Hilda Jeanne Morrisey. She had kept that name unchanged all her life, even through her two marriages-both of them brief, ancient and (as she now thought) pretty damn stupid, since there were so many less troublesome ways of having sex. Hilda Morrisey stood a hundred and sixty centimeters tall and weighed fifty kilograms, give or take a kilo or so. That weight also had not changed since her long-ago days as a police cadet, although it was true that it seemed to take more and more effort to keep it so. Her rank in the National Bureau of Investigation was full colonel. It had taken a lot of work on her part to keep that unchanged, too. Colonel Morrisey was long overdue for the promotion that the Bureau's higher brass kept trying to force on her.

The thing about that promotion wasn't that Hilda Morrisey objected to either the higher pay or the higher rank. What she minded was the consequences. Being promoted one step higher would automatically move her to a desk in the NBI headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and Hilda hated desk jobs.

The place where she felt at home was in a communications truck in, say, Nebraska, commanding a raid on their rad-right religious militias, or flying high over the Sea of Marmara to listen to the furtive, coded reports of the agent she had run into the Kurdish command post somewhere on the slopes of Mt. Ararat. Or, for that matter, her present assignment in New York, which was recruiting bilingual Japanese-Americans to penetrate the car factories in Osaka, who were apparently violating the trade agreements by using New Guinea-made parts in their allegedly all-Japanese cars.

Anywhere, in short, but in a desk job. A brigadier's star was hers by right of seniority, but accepting it would cost her all those fun jobs. True, Bureau policy was "Up or Out," but not for Hilda. She had been beating that rule for years. When the personnel people got too antsy about her status they always had to buck the question up to the director himself. Who always said, "Hilda won't take Up, and she's just too damn good for Out. Give the silly bitch another waiver." And they always did.

The other thing about Colonel Hilda was that, even at nevermind-how-old, she was still a pretty neat-looking woman-which is to say one who had very little trouble in attracting any man who attracted her. Like, for instance, the man friend of the moment, Wilbur Carmichael, who-once this distasteful job was complete-she had every intention of giving a call that evening.

But the other thing about those jobs she liked so well was that every once in a while they had a bad spot. Like the present one, which required her to do something she really hated, namely to arrest-or rearrest-one of her own.