The zenith angle (16 page)

“Don’t talk that way about him.” Tony tightened his grip on his rifle. “He was my guru.”

“Sorry,
bhaiyya.
” Sanjay seemed touched. “Really sorry. It’s just . . . that is such a wonderful script for a horror movie. Very modern. Very Ramgopal Varma.”

Tony gritted his teeth. “I never told you that story, Sanjay. You never heard that story from me. Nobody ever talks about Tom that way. Nobody asks or tells.”

Sanjay shrugged, and fixed Tony with his brown, lambent gaze. “The man is my host! Why would I talk against him? I ate his salt—although, thank God, I never ate his meat.”

“Right.”

“I’ve been around the world many times. I’ve seen stranger things than the fate of your guru. The world is strange, these days.”

“Tom’s life was always strange.” After a moment, Tony decisively jacked a round into the chamber.

“Sanjay, all these elk must be destroyed.”

“What, all of them? Now? Today?”

“Yes. Because elk wasting is a contagious disease. It’s an unclean herd. The Colorado tourist trade doesn’t talk about it much, but for obvious reasons, they’re at war with this.”

Sanjay considered this for a long moment. Slushy snow fell from the height of a tree. “What a beautiful hunting trip you have offered me here in America,” he said at last. “Look at the huge head on your fine beast here. What’s that word?”

“Antlers.”

“Antlers, yes. Fantastic antlers. Another fine trophy for my hunting club in Ootacamund.”

“Let the head be, Sanjay. You don’t want a taxidermist touching that brain matter.”

Six more elk, stumbling together in a clump, entered the clearing. The elk had their muzzles down, as if sniffing along. They were thudding into each other’s flanks as if they found comfort in it. They were graceless and dirty. Some were drooling.

Tony snapped off a shot. It was hard to miss at this range. A cow went down and lay in the grass, thrashing. The herd panicked at the sound of the shot, but they could not see to flee. They just stumbled, crashing and ripping their hides against the underbrush.

Sanjay deftly shouldered the heavy Winchester. The rifle boomed again and again and more elk buckled, jerked backward, and collapsed. When the heavy-grain bullets took them at the base of the neck, the elk went down as if guillotined. Sanjay was an excellent shot.

One surviving elk thrashed into the undergrowth. It wouldn’t be hard to track. Sanjay put a final shot into a crippled cow.

He gave Tony a brotherly pat on the shoulder. “You don’t worry about this, Tony. Because yes, I understand. I can help you with problems like this.”

“Just as long as it’s quick, Sanjay. And kept quiet.”

Sanjay swung his chiseled chin in a nod. “We’ll get my very best boys! And your very best guns.”

EIGHT

WASHINGTON–COLORADO, FEBRUARY 2002

T
he CCIAB had a difficult relationship with America’s spy satellites. Spy satellites were critical infrastructure of intense and lasting importance to national security. Since the satellite programs also had a huge black budget, everybody naturally wanted in.

The little CCIAB was in no political position to make any bold grab for these crown jewels of orbiting spookdom. As Tony Carew had cynically pointed out, the likeliest role for the CCIAB here would be

“fall guy.”

And yet, on a stark, technical level, the KH-13 satellite was badly broken. Obviously, some really gifted technician ought to fix the thing. Nobody seemed to be getting anywhere with it. If the KH-13 failed, that would be a massive disaster. An economic, industrial, technical, and military mess. Van felt that preventing a massive disaster was probably his duty. What else was he good for? Why else had they hired him? What else was he doing in Washington?

Van knew that the CCIAB had many pressing problems on its agenda. These were serious political challenges innate to any reform in computer security: the distribution of security-certification logos, the establishment of baseline security standards, a wise judgment of the regulatory costs of compliance, the daunting difficulties of online patch distribution, the rating of potential flaws and vulnerabilities, even the awful discovery of certain flaws “too expensive to fix” . . . The list went on and on. Basically, these problems had one commonality: they couldn’t be programmed away or fixed by engineers. They could only be solved through sincere, extensive, fully briefed bargaining and negotiation among the power players. That was why nothing much had ever happened to resolve those problems. This whole situation was the very opposite of his grandfather’s rules for technical progress—especially, that burning need to stay close to the machinery.

The KH-13 was machinery. Van thought that he could shine there.

Van knew that fixing a spy satellite was a long-shot. Realistically speaking, how could one computer-science professor cure an ailing multibillion-dollar spacecraft? But Van also knew that the job was not hopeless. Such things sometimes happened in real life. For instance: Richard Feynman was just a physicist. But Feynman had dropped a chunk of rubber O-ring into a glass of ice water, and he had shown the whole world, on TV, how a space shuttle could blow up.

If Van somehow solved Hickok’s zillion-dollar problem, that would prove that he, Derek Vandeveer, had a top-notch, Richard Feynman kind of class.

Van had sacrificed a lot to get his role in public service. He’d given up his happy home, his family life, his civilian career, his peace of mind, and a whole, whole lot of his money. Van wanted to see real results from all that sacrifice. He wanted to do something vital.

The KH-13 was probably the grandest and most secret gizmo that the USA possessed. If Van somehow found the KH-13’s busted O-ring, then he would be giving America the ability to photograph the entire planet, in visible and infrared, day and night, digitally, repeatedly, on a three-inch scale. Yes, that really mattered.

Careful not to mention the advice he had gotten from Tony, Van broached the matter with Jeb. Jeb quickly understood the implications. Yes, it would obviously get the CCIAB a lot of kudos if they could technically outsmart the Air Force, the Space Force, the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA, and the host of federal contractors who had been working on satellites since the days of the V-2 rocket. It would make the CCIAB look like geniuses and it was just the kind of stunt that really impressed congressmen. Weighed against that was the scary prospect of getting in over their heads, then getting blamed for it.

So Jeb, in his own turn, talked the matter over with some old-school technical buddies from DARPA and the Defense Department’s Office of Special Projects.

A plan emerged: a firewall strategy. Jeb would protect the CCIAB by moving Van one step out from the organization. For satellite work, Jeb had Van “loaned out” from the CCIAB to the “Transformational Communications Architecture Office.” The TCAO was a joint effort of the Defense Information Systems Agency, and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence.

The “Transformational Communications Architecture Office” was an easy outfit for Van to work for, because, basically, the Office did not exist. The Office was just an empty box in one of Donald Rumsfeld’s ambitious DoD “Transformation” schemes. And even the NRO and NSA were terrified of Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld had once been the boss of the futurists at RAND. Rumsfeld had a horrible knack for asking simple, embarrassing questions that nobody had ever thought about before. Nobody wanted to cross him.

Rumsfeld seemed kind of okay about cyberwar issues. Whenever computer security was mentioned at National Security briefings, Rumsfeld made some brisk notes. Tom Ridge’s imaginary Homeland Security agency was badly stuck in the mud, but Jeb felt pretty cheerful about Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense. Donald Rumsfeld was the closest thing the CCIAB had to a patron in the Bush cabinet. So, like a lot of other policy players in the Bush administration, Jeb had taken to speaking in Rumsfeldese. In return for allowing Van to meddle with the KH-13 satellite, Jeb announced that it was time for Grendel, Van’s “project launch,” to be “spun out and delegated to a responsible agency that can add some structure.” Van was not allowed to whine or moan to Jeb about this harsh decision, either. Instead, Van was told to “avoid overcontrolling” and to “ease that personality bottleneck.”

It was Hickok who explained to Van what this speech meant in English. “Your boss is taking away your best toy and he’s selling it out to the highest bidder, fella. Your Grendel gizmo is bait for the brass hats now, pure and simple. Jeb wants to see those big boys fighting a bidding war to take that thing over, see?

That’ll improve his bargaining position with them.”

“But I built it,” Van protested. “Plus, I paid for it all with my own checks.”

“So what? You can’t grow it any bigger. You don’t have the money or staff around here. So don’t you feel bad about that! If some major outfit takes all that hard work on for y’all, hey, that’s a big victory!”

Hickok beamed on him. The loss of Grendel meant that Van had time to work on Hickok’s problem. So, Van won official permission to tinker with satellites. Unofficially, this permission meant very little, because Van was already neck-deep inside the blue folder. Michael Hickok, the man who had leaked it to him, had instantly become Van’s best war buddy.

The two of them were always close, because Hickok was physically chained to the KH-13’s secret documents. Whenever Van examined the satellite’s problems, Hickok had to be present with him in the room. Van had never gotten over the burning tingle of curiosity, the technical thrill he first felt as he leafed through the weird, forbidden schematics of the world’s most advanced flying spy machine. At first, as Van obsessed over the KH-13’s malfunction reports, Hickok just idled around the CCIAB’s concrete den inside the Vault. He flirted with Fawn, made cell-phone calls to a series of loose women, and paged through computer security brochures.

But Michael Hickok was a man of action. It wasn’t in him to waste time. He watched Van’s office routines, then he made himself useful.

Van’s least favorite job was to demo security gadgets for the Vault’s many cyberwar groupies. There were packs of gizmos arriving for Van every day. Dongles and decryptors. Peel-and-stick RFID labels. Teflon and Kevlar security cables. Barcodes and asset tags. Ridiculous homemade EMP blasters right out of the aluminum-foil hat set. Teensy-tiny locks on chipsets sculpted right into the microscopic silicon with ultra-high-tech MEMS techniques . . . The CCIAB had become a clearinghouse for American infowar toys.

Van spent a lot of valuable overtime reviewing and clearing peculiar gizmos for the Special Forces. The Delta Force, the Navy SEALS . . . they got to carry any kind of gadget they pleased, but they were too small to support their own R&D labs. They had to depend on the kindness of strangers. Hickok quickly got the hang of Van’s spiel to Vault visitors. It was basically the same old Frequently Asked Security Questions, over and over again. Van hated this mind-dulling routine. When ignorant people failed to read the manual and asked him stupid questions, this brought out Van’s tough, potted-cactus side.

After watching Van stammer, bark, and hand-saw his way through these briefings, Hickok asserted himself and just took them over. Hickok did very well at the work. Hickok had a knack for boiling down complex technical issues to a military briefing level that career bureaucrats could understand. With his baritone voice, his soldierly good looks, and two fists that could break solid bricks, Michael Hickok was a top-notch computer-security salesman. He was certainly the best promoter that the little CCIAB had ever had. Hickok scared the living daylights out of people. Once Hickok was through wringing them out, federal officials would leave their business cards with pale and trembling fingers, and beg for emergency help.

Van’s new best pal was no computer whiz. He was a whiskey-drinking Alabama guy with a high school education. Hickok liked dirty jokes, heavy metal music, and reckless women, except on Sundays, when he was always in church. Hickok was the simplest man that Van had ever befriended. Hickok had few self-doubts. Hickok had no interest in complex ideas. Intellectual puzzles just irritated him. Van found something very refreshing about all this.

It took just one more thing to move the two of them from coworkers to comrades. That thing was gunfire. Guns were much more than just a hobby for Michael Hickok. Guns were a basis of Hickok’s very life.

The two of them went out two times a week, and on Sunday evenings after Hickok’s church services, drinking heavily, bowling, and firing advanced automatic weapons. They quit bowling after two Sundays, because Van was an excellent bowler and Hickok really hated getting beaten at anything. So they stopped the bowling, and cut back on the drinking. They settled on just the guns. Van was happy to learn about guns. Hickok knew plenty about them, and Van was a star student. Van hadn’t fired a weapon since he’d plonked at rabbits with a single-shot .22 on his grandfather’s ranch. In Hickok’s company, though, Van put on goggles and ear protectors. He roared his way through Ingrams, Uzis, and Pentagon lab models with no names at all, just acronyms. Weapons like the boxlike

“OICW,” the “M249 SAW,” and a futuristic, four-barreled, 15mm mini-rocket launcher from the U.S. Army’s Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Massachusetts.

Hickok had incredible contacts in the world of specialized weapons testing. Hickok knew gun nuts who made Charlton Heston look like Winnie the Pooh.

Van quickly discovered that guns were extremely interesting technical devices. When Van considered the many ingenious engineering problems that had been solved by master gunsmiths, he was fascinated. It didn’t matter to Van that he was myopic and only a middling good shot. Van spent most of his time in the range stripping Hickok’s guns down and putting them back together.

Left free to get hands-on with guns, Van learned a lot. Enough to know that he could build a gun himself, if he wanted.

If he ever built a gun, it would be a digital cybergun. It would be smart, interactive, precise, speedy. It would put every single bullet exactly where it was meant to go. It would fill up graveyards faster than the Black Death.