The zenith angle (26 page)

Van put his hand up. He could not feel the shape of his mouth. His cheek. It was all gone. There was nothing there but a nightmare patch of bloody mush.

Things were lively at the local emergency room. A man who had merely had his face smashed in had to sit down and take a number.

Van held his iced towel against the ruins of his face. He could not touch the damage there without mind-bending pain and a sense of deep, cosmic, nightmare terror. He hadn’t merely lost some of his teeth. He had fractured, really smashed, the inner structure of his skull. The gaping wound wasn’t about to stop bleeding. The staffers were calling around for a specialist surgeon. The young woman sitting next to Van had red, staring eyes and dirty blond dreadlocks soaked in drying blood. Gore had soaked the shoulders of her white Guatemalan blouse. Blood had spattered her broomstick skirt.

“Hey, friend,” she said to him. “What’s your affinity group?”

Van moaned, his tongue thick with blood.

The girl opened a woven yarn-bag covered with leftist political buttons. She dug in her bag and retrieved a small digital videocam. “So, you were outside the World Bank with us, right? Did they come after you with those horses?”

Van said nothing.

“That’s when I caught it, from the horses. I sure hope somebody puts all that up on Indymedia. Did anybody tape you? I mean, when the pigs hit you?”

Van shook his head minimally.

The bleeding girl looked around the chaos in the emergency room. It looked like a campground for derelicts. “I wonder where they put the rest of us. We can’t be the only ones.”

A wave of blackness coursed through the rupture in Van’s head. He blinked in silent agony.

“Your eyes look nice,” she told him. “You didn’t get peppergassed.”

Van nodded behind his blood-soaked towel.

“I’m gonna have to get stitches,” said the bleeding girl. “They’re gonna shave off my hair. But, friend, I don’t feel scared anymore. I just don’t feel scared of those warmongers. Because the power is in the streets now, man. I can feel the power.” She squeezed Van’s loose hand, warmly. “Our streets, okay, brother? Our streets! They can bust my head, they can bust your head, but they can’t bust everybody’s head. Pretty soon America will wake from this nightmare. The corporate media lies, man! They all
lie
!”

Van shifted his towel. Some ghastly crust parted stickily into the fabric. The icy numbness came alive with a flare of deep, burning pain.

“You know why I feel so happy now?” said the injured girl. “Because there weren’t any
chemtrails
today. I checked again and again. I looked up at the sky and it was clean! No more chemicals up there!

So they’re just plain running out of whatever that bad stuff is, that’s what I think. That poison that keeps the people so passive.”

Van’s eyes blurred over. He was suffering double vision. Double vision had never happened to him before. Now he understood why people talked about it so much.

“After 9/11 there weren’t any jet trails up there for
three whole days,
” the girl insisted shrilly. “Not one jet trail across all of America! What does
that
tell you, huh? Wow, just
think
about what that means!”

A nurse slid her face in Van’s field of view. “You’re Dr. Vandeveer? Yes?” She slid a blood-pressure cuff over his arm. “We’ve got to move you now. I think we’ve found you that ambulance.”

ELEVEN

WASHINGTON, D.C., FEBRUARY 2002

V
an was in a hospital bed, confronting his e-mail. His damaged face was hot and stretched. The flesh felt rubbery. An inflated tire, a Macy’s blimp. There was a very thin strip of surgical steel, securing the ruins of his left canine and bicuspid. His aching tongue could not stay away from that wire. It was like a steel I-beam installed in his head.

Dottie had written him such a brave letter. Dottie was apologizing to him for daring to be so lonely and unhappy. She was promising to do better. She said that she was proud of him. As sedatives coursed through his flesh, Van read his wife’s electronic sentences over and over. For the first time in his life, he could literally hear Dottie’s spoken voice behind her blurry pixels. Van thumbed his way back to the top of the screen again. Some indescribable comfort was seeping into him. In real life, Dottie would not have repeated the same consoling words to him, over and over again, one hundred slow, blurry times. A man in a hospital needed that.

Of course, he hadn’t yet typed one word to Dottie about getting his face smashed in. What was he going to tell her? What if somebody else told her about it first?

He had just gone through a violent, crazy, amazingly painful ordeal, all for the sake of some wild notion .

. . so useless, something utterly stupid . . . Van turned his aching face toward the black plastic case of spy tools.

Van’s burgled apartment was not a safe place to leave a top-secret infowar tool case. So, despite the surprised protests of doctors and nurses, the hardware was still with Van. The case was locked to Van’s iron hospital bed frame with a laptop security cable. Come and take it, if you dare. Van had beaten the living daylights out of another American in order to control the tools. Van sank his swollen head into the small, sterile pillow. His face had been smashed in by a computer security policy war. Why not some kind of real shooting war, for heaven’s sake? He wouldn’t feel half so bad if he’d been mangled while fighting with al Qaeda.

Van slid his tongue along the luscious edge of that steel wire inside his head. He was never in his life ever going to fight al Qaeda. Van knew that perfectly well now. Cyber-security was all about computer policy. Infowar was a form of war for high-tech people sitting quietly at desks. Bin Laden didn’t surf the net. Al Qaeda were Third World fanatics on low-tech bicycles who talked only to their mullahs and their cousins. Al Qaeda guys got recruited in madrassas and sent to live in Pakistani slums and Afghan villages. They were bitter, freaked-out, culture-shocked men. They existed in such a frenzy of rage and wounded pride that suicide was a blessed relief to them. Being a martyr was so much, much better than being al Qaeda that they leapt at a chance to explode themselves in the midst of much happier people. “We long for death more than you long for life.” That was their bumper sticker. Terrorists didn’t fight wars. The whole point of terrorism was to kick a government so hard, in so tender and precious a spot, that the government went nuts from rage and fear. Then the machinery of civilization would pour smoke from the exhaust. It would break down. Back to the tribes and the sermons, the blessed darkness of a world without questions.

Van looked at the chained black case. So it did matter. Cyberwar had always been about Americans and what Americans chose to do with their tools. Van knew that it mattered, because all he had to do was imagine himself losing the fight. Suppose that Wimberley broke into the hospital room and tried to take the case again. Would Van lie back with a ruined smile this time, let the hardware go? No. Not at all. Van would yank the intravenous feed from his arm, jump up, and fight all over again. After all, he had won. Maybe no one knew how, why, or what the real reasons were, but so what? The world was full of humiliating, secret battles. Van had won in front of witnesses who were used to secret fights. No substitute for victory. He was woozy and scarred in a Washington hospital, but somewhere, a rogue operative had been dragged back to some lair with the crap beaten out of him by a computer-science professor. Message sent. Let’s roll.

Van rubbed one-handed at his crusty eyes. He slid sideways into a twilight sleep. When he woke the anesthetics had faded. His broken skull smoldered like a fire in a coal mine. Every scrap of flesh, once cold and rubbery, was burning briskly.

Dr. Mukherjee was the young surgeon on the night shift who had rebuilt Van’s face. Mukherjee had luminous eyes, slender wrists, and a sweet smile full of unfeigned doctorly kindness. Mukherjee set his transparent clipboard aside. He probed the interior of Van’s mouth with his white-gloved fingers. “There is no sign of infection,” he reported, staring intently and feeling his way over the aching pulp. “The facial bones will knit quickly in a man who is so fit.” The latex-coated fingers left Van’s mouth. Mukherjee gave Van’s solid left bicep a reassuring pat. “You are military, eh? A training accident.”

Van grunted. His pulpy gums were blazing with pain.

Dr. Mukherjee nodded knowingly. “Demerol.” Mukherjee made a note on his clipboard with the gleaming steel of a Rotring ballpoint. “Your blood pressure is too high for a young man. You should go fishing, eh? Take leave for a while. Relax.”

Van moved his shoulders to suggest a shrug. He was sore from kicks and punches in his back and gut. The spreading bruises from those wallops were nothing compared to his broken head, though.

“We will discharge you tonight. The breaks were clean and the ducts were not severed. New bone will grow through the bone cement. In a month, the steel comes out. That’s a walk-in procedure.”

Van realized that he was being told amazingly good news. Face smashed in, yet he was out of the hospital in one day. Should he feel grateful?

“You will need tomography,” said Dr. Mukherjee. “The roots of the teeth, there I cannot tell you. I’m a maxillofacial surgeon. I’m not an orthodontist.”

“Mmmph.”

“You need to see an orthodontist, Mr. Vandeveer. In your later life, you might spend much time with orthodontists.” Dr. Mukherjee delicately turned a sheet of hospital paper. “If you were not American . . . or if you lived thirty years ago, which is to say the same thing . . . then you would have been badly disfigured last night. Yes, marked for life. Very unfortunate. But not today. No. Today you will be fully restored to quite normal appearance. They do wonderful things with teeth now. Although the lip, the lip concerns me.”

Van’s split and stitched upper lip no longer felt like part of him. It belonged to some distant, remote, legendary being. The Michelin Man, maybe.

“You will lisp,” said Dr. Mukherjee. “For a while. You might lisp
quite
a while.”

Van nodded silently.

“There will be scarring. Cosmetic surgery is a possibility. Or you might grow a beard, sir. A beard would look good on you, I think.”

Fawn brought him flowers.

“Nobody knows about what happened,” she assured him. “I mean, okay, Mike Hickok knows. So I know. And those two tough guys in your apartment, they must have got a real shock. Because you beat his ass up!” Fawn’s eyes shone with sincere secretarial pride. “That was just so awesome. Wow! I told everybody that you fell down the stairs. Was that okay?”

Van typed and showed Fawn the screen of his laptop.

“You look better than I expected. That must really hurt a lot, though.”

Van spread his hands. The pain of healing was different from the shocking, heart-thudding pain of being wounded. Pain made him simpleminded and sentimental. It made him wildly, totally impatient.

“I brought you a good book to read. I know it can get pretty boring in a hospital.”

Fawn offered Van a paperback. Van took it. An embedded needle twinged in his left forearm. Fawn’s book was an obscure, Czech-printed, English-language paperback edition of some plays and essays of Vaclav Havel. To judge by the smashed spine and dog-eared pages, it had spent hard time in the bottom of a student’s backpack.

Somehow this ludicrously crushed and smashed book gave Van a warm, grateful feeling. This artifact was so much worse off than he was.

Fawn blinked behind her glasses. “I spent a lot of time in hospitals when I was like sixteen, seventeen. I mean, a
lot
of time. That used to drive my dad nuts. Even my mom freaked out, and she was, like, used to our health problems.”

Van put Fawn’s book on the steel roller-tray next to his bowl of mush.

“When I got better, I made my parents send me to Prague. Because I heard that Prague was like the coolest place to get away from your crazy parents. Well, Prague was cool, but I was never a cool person. I did make this one cool friend there though. My friend Eva. She’s Czech. Eva knew my dad, so Eva was nice to me.”

Van typed at his screen.

“That book’s real rare here in America. All Czech stuff is small-press stuff. It’s a small country.”

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

Fawn ignored him. “See, here back in the USA, they always talk about Vaclav Havel like he was some kind of saint. Well, he was. He is. But my pal Eva, she’s, like, personally related to Vaclav Havel. Eva had to have this saint guy as her President.”

Van raised his brows, or tried to. The right brow moved. The left one was still numbed from his surgery.

“Eva told me, yeah, Vaclav Havel is like this saint, but a saint can’t run a government. I mean, very first thing, the country splits in half. Havel is a terrible administrator. His health was bad, all the time. And his first wife, the First Lady everybody really liked, she died of cancer. He married the second wife and nobody could stand her, because she’s, like, this hippie actress.”

Van looked at her silently. Why was Fawn torturing him like this? What on earth was the woman’s point?

“We’ve never had a really good talk like this before, you and me!” Fawn said. She removed a pair of latex gloves from her purse and found herself a tissue. “I feel like we’re really communicating now!”

With a struggle, Van found his tongue. His tongue had not been directly hurt in any way that he understood, but his tongue was really sore anyway. “Thanks,” he lisped. “It was good of you to come, Fawn.”

Fawn’s eyes briefly leaked tears. “I don’t want you to worry about anything, boss. I’m taking care of all of it for you.”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“I’m gonna get you your money back that you spent on Grendel. Jeb said that should be my number-one priority. And wow, the way you screwed up that requisition process, getting that money back is like a full-time job.”

Van sniffed. His sinuses were a wreck.

“Jeb really admires you. I mean, for a cop, Jeb really knows a lot about computers. Jeb doesn’t mind that computer geeks are kind of hopeless idealists. Jeb knows you were really the best.”