Princippi had staked his claim to the White House by touting the exploding economy he had presided over as governor of Massachusetts, and he was right in singling out his stellar achievement. What he failed to tell the nation was that the real miracle in his home state was the fact that the makers of red ink were able to produce enough of the stuff to keep up with Prin-cippi's wild spending spree. This was the secret Michael Princippi effectively hid from the voters for so long: although he was an experienced technocrat with a penchant for knowing where all the paper clips in the governor's office were, his administration blew through money like a thresher through a field of autumn wheat.
For much of the race, it seemed that the voters would overlook Princippi's obvious shortcomings.
That was until the question.
It was at the second debate. He was up against the then vice president, and Barney Shea, the cable anchorman, had asked a personal question that the reporter hoped would help the governor dispel the silly notion that he lacked passion.
"Governor Princippi," the anchorman began, "Kiki Princippi is decapitated and her twitching body violated by four sweating stevedores. What do you do?"
Kiki. His wife. As the cameras whirred away, as the satellites beamed the small man's image to millions of homes across the country, Michael Princippi paused for dramatic effect, pondering the question.
At long last the man who would be president spoke.
"I'd identify the body, obviously, Barney—well, at least the head...."
The full text of the response, though telecast almost
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daily up until election day, was irrelevant. The Prince had screwed the pooch.
Princippi lost the race in a landslide.
When his party surged ahead four years later, retaking 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the first time in twelve years, Michael Princippi had gone on the few talk shows that would have him and pontificated his opinion that the then president-elect's victory was a ratification of Princippi's own abortive campaign. Four years after his dream had gone down in flames, Michael Princippi was still claiming victory. Something deep about having lost the battle but won the war.
During the most recent presidential race, his party had treated him like a poor relation. His calls to offer assistance to the national committee headquarters in Washington had gone unreturned. He'd gone full cycle from being courted to becoming a pariah.
He swore for the absolute last time, as he had so many times in the past, that his career in the fickle world of politics was at a definite end.
And this time his resolution held, until he heard through his remaining political connections of a place out west where all questions could be answered...and all answers were guaranteed to come true.
It was after midnight when Michael Princippi arrived in Thermopolis, Wyoming. The battered Volkswagen Beetle he had driven since his days in law school coughed clouds of thick exhaust into the warm spring air.
The former governor's excessive personal frugality had been fodder for the stand-up comedians during the heady days of the '88 campaign, and the rickety old
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car had borne the brunt of many an attack. While the worst of the barbs were flying, Michael Princippi's only concern was that the ridicule would force him to go out and buy a new car. After all, this one only had 190,000 miles on it and forty-eight oil changes.
Ten years later, with the odometer a few miles shy of its fourth restart, Michael Princippi chugged past the sleepy Thermopolis houses with their Re-elect Senator Jackson Cole signs tapped arrow-straight in their neatly tended lawns.
He remembered with some bitterness that Jackson Cole had been a friend of his opponent during the presidential race and he briefly considered aiming the Volkswagen across a few of the tidier lawns that displayed the senator's owlish visage. But back in Ohio, he had been forced to bind the rusted-out muffler in place with his shoelaces, and he was afraid the jostling would snap them loose.
Princippi left the images of Cole behind him as he passed through the far side of town. A few miles out he came upon the flashing amber light that was suspended above the twisting paved road, and he turned left onto the well-marked dirt path that led to Ranch Ragnarok.
He drove several miles into the thickening woods before his washed-out headlights caught sight of armed patrols. At each twist in the path where he saw them, the Ragnarok guards would pause briefly—like deer mesmerized by the flash of light from the oncoming vehicle—before resuming their march through the cluster of trees.
Princippi passed through the gate without incident. Either no one recognized him after so many years out
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of the political spotlight, or the Ragnarok soldiers were trained not to be awed by celebrity—something Michael Princippi still considered himself to be. Whatever the reason, no one batted an eye as Mike "the Prince" Princippi pulled up to the ranch house at the end of the main path.
A full-figured woman in white-and-gold vestments waited for him on the wide hacienda-style porch. When Princippi climbed out of his car, she rose from a small wooden bench beside the door.
"You're here for Kaspar," she intoned.
It was a statement, not a question. Her eyes were dull and her voice flat. For a second he thought she was wearing a mask. On closer inspection, he realized both of her eyes had been blackened. Painful dark rings encircled both eyes, making her resemble a raven-haired raccoon. Her nose was bluish and slightly swollen.
Princippi cleared his throat. "I'm here to see my future."
The woman sighed. "You want Kaspar," she said, nodding to herself. "Everyone wants Kaspar."
She beckoned him inside the ranch.
There was an office in a former bedroom at the rear of the building and, between a pair of four-drawer filing cabinets, a concrete staircase descended into the earth below.
Princippi followed the woman down.
The tunnel was cool and musty. Lally support columns held up iron cross beams, and the side walls were stacked with cinder blocks as far into the distance as Michael Princippi could see.
The dirt floor was boxed in with open frames of
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wood, which butted up against one another. Princippi had to step over the four-inch-high cross sections of wood every few feet.
"They start pouring the concrete tomorrow," the woman called over her shoulder by way of explanation.
At several points along the way the new tunnel met with sections that appeared to be older. Vast storehouses faded into the distant shadows both left and right of the tunnel.
There were rooms packed to the ceiling with U.S. Army surplus supplies. Boxes of K rations left over from the Korean War were piled neatly on forged metal shelves. One room held nothing but jug upon jug of bottled water. Most of the rooms, however, seemed stuffed to near overflowing with crates bearing sinister-sounding names like White Phosphorus and Thermite in bold black stenciled letters on the sides. There were various cryptic warnings on all of the containers concerning the danger of exposure to fire or extreme heat. Disconcertingly these were packed next to huge galvanized steel drums that reeked of gasoline.
Other rooms were lined with rack upon rack of guns. More weapons than Princippi had ever seen— even during his famous photo-op tank ride during the 1988 presidential race. Ragnarok soldiers shuffled sleeplessly through the underground chambers in a human parody of a paramilitary ant colony.
Judging from where they had entered the tunnel, Princippi guessed that the rooms were all near or beneath the large, warehouse-type buildings he had seen in the distance on his drive up, and he was relieved
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when the woman led him beyond this area and into another long stretch of newly constructed tunnel.
This section seemed to go on forever, but at last he saw that the thread of insulated wire that was tacked to the cinder-block wall and hung at regular intervals with sickly yellow lights along the whole length of the tunnel finally turned upward.
He was escorted up another flight of concrete stairs and soon found himself in the torch-lit interior of the old airplane hangar.
Without a backward glance, Esther Clear-Seer led him through the building to the Pythia Pit.