The zenith angle (27 page)

I
am
the best, Van thought. Was it worth the pain to mention this out loud? No. No use in saying that at all.

“I learned so much working with you,” Fawn told him gratefully. “Like, it was so cool of you not to say anything to anybody about my stupid little love affair at the office. I had to grow out of that little problem on my own. I always heard that was unprofessional, but you know, until I really did it, with a really stupid guy like Mike Hickok, I didn’t know why it was stupid.”

Van’s heart began thudding.

“Anyway, now I’m fully briefed about that. So I’ve just folded that up and put that little subject away.”

Fawn wasn’t kidding. “Van, I just got two great job offers from DARPA and Homeland Security. I can get an important, top-level staff job with a real federal bureau. They know I worked with you and Jeb, and they want me bad. You’d definitely pick DARPA if you were me, right? DARPA, they’re Advanced Research Projects, and all.”

Van nodded.

“That’s why I’m picking Homeland Security. Security work is a good job for a single woman. Women are great about home and security issues. I kind of stink at advanced research, but home and security, that is all about attention to detail. That’s where I shine.”

Van closed his eyes. He opened them. Unfortunately, Fawn was still sitting there.

“I mean, like, when we started whistle-blowing at Enron—that was all us
women
in the Enron office who were doing that, you know. We women at Enron were the only ones who were
paying attention to the
details.
”

Van stared at her.

“Boy, those big cowboys in Houston sure thought they were hell on wheels. ‘Fast Andy’ Fastow, Ken Lay . . . They kept dividing the company into these
neat little teams,
you know, just ten percent of the normal accountants . . . Really quick responses, and all these quiet, secret offshore projects that no one ever talked about . . . I’m so lucky that Jeb found me a federal job after all that. I mean, life after working for Enron . . . I don’t even
tell
people that I once worked for Enron. The weirdest part is, that was like a totally plum job, too. I mean, Enron recruited the top of the top of the class. The best of the best. I was Enron fresh out of college.”

Van sucked cold air through the gap in his broken teeth.

“But thanks to you, I can make a brand-new career. In federal security, I can go just as far as my talent can take me. There’s no glass ceiling there! I mean, Janet Reno was Attorney General!”

Resignedly, Van adjusted Fawn’s bedside bouquet.

“Can I tell you one more thing, Van? You look so nice without that beard. You look so normal. I mean, that side of your face that isn’t swollen. I like your hair that way, too. It’s kind of like Sonny Bono before he became a congressman.” Fawn offered him her nicest smile. Then she sneaked a look at her watch. Van showed her his computer screen.

WHAT ABOUT THE HAVEL BOOK, THOUGH

“You can keep that.”

Van typed faster.I MEAN

“You read it, and see if you can find that out for yourself,” she said. ERLETTE HOUSE, VIRGINIA, MARCH 2002

Erlette House was an eighteenth-century Virginia estate. It had once been a rival of Mount Vernon or Monticello. It had become a country retreat for the power elite in Washington. Once upon some mythical time, most senators and congressmen had been land-owning squires. They felt most at their ease in the simple, warm hospitality of some big rural farm. In Erlette House, this gentlemanly fiction was still kept up. The hay fields were still raked with teams of horses, even though Erlette House had helicopter pads, a landing strip, and a computer center. Erlette House was surrounded by modern Virginia suburbs, with strip malls and glass office towers. But Erlette House was still a real country estate, sort of. It had livestock, roses, and swans.

Van, Dottie, and Ted had been assigned their own rooms in the Erlette House “Lake Cottage.” This

“cottage,” actually a small mansion, featured stone hearths, Federal-style chairs of antique oak, primitive American art, and a four-poster bed with a lovely handmade quilt. The Lake Cottage brimmed over with old-school East Coast Establishment virtue. Every object in its rooms sat there in timeless restraint, polished by good taste, power, and heaps of old money. Except, of course, for Van’s and Dottie’s laptops, which were like two Martian tripods out of H. G. Wells.

Dottie collapsed on the bed. The white feather mattress dented around her like a stick-toasted marshmallow. Dottie was very prone to airsickness. Her long flight to Erlette House on Tony’s jouncing private jet had badly upset her stomach. She was pale and greenish.

Van popped the lid from a cold curved bottle with an attachment of his Swiss Army cyberknife. “You want a Dramamine, sweetie?”

“I’m trying to keep one down,” Dottie said in a small, pinched voice. Van put Dottie’s Perrier bottle on the bedside table. The bedside table was ancient, wobbly, and dented. The table was very old. It was some kind of eighteenth-century American furniture invention that had never quite caught on. It looked like it had been whittled into shape by Ben Franklin on a bad day. Van sat in a shield-back mahogany chair next to Ted’s space-age plastic child-carrier. Dottie’s spell of weakness gave Van the tenderest and most protective kind of husbandly feeling. She had been so glad to see him, practically tumbling into his arms off the plane.

Although she knew some of the truth by now, Dottie hadn’t said one word to him about his crowned teeth, his new beard, or the lisp. Actually, Dottie had said something to him about the lisp. She had said that it made him sound like Humphrey Bogart.

Van freed Ted from his plastic seating device. He put Ted on his knee. Ted was cheerful. Ted did not mind air trips at all. Ted was in top condition, as if he’d been shipped from distant Colorado in Ted-shaped foam blocks.

Ted looked thoughtfully at his stricken mom, as if logging her vulnerabilities for future exploitation.

“You should just go now, Derek,” Dottie said, words muffled into the pillow. “I’m sure you and your boss have a lot to talk about here.”

Van settled deeper into his chair. “I don’t care,” he said.

Dottie turned restlessly. “What?”

“I said I don’t care, honey. This is my outfit’s last big event, and I gave that job all I want to give to it. I don’t want to see any of the panels here. I don’t care about the speakers or the lobbyists. I don’t want to schmooze . . .” Van winced. Van hated the word “schmooze,” and with his scarred lip it sounded even nastier, somehow. “. . . schmooze with the presenters. I never liked to speak in public. I’m not gonna talk here. No. They got enough out of me. Enough is enough. It’s all political now. We’re putting on a big campaign show here. I hate this.”

“Oh, honey.”

“This dumb business with Tony’s jet. I got hurt, and we ran out of time to do it right. It’s not fully proofed and tested. That prototype would never work under real-life conditions, any more than Star Wars missile shields can work. It’s vaporware. It’s a hoax!”

“Oh, honey, if you worked on it, I’m sure it’s not a hoax.”

“Well, it’s just symbolic. That’s the best you can say about it. I’m a scientist! I’m a scientist, and I’m doing political spin.” Van ran his hands over the lengthening bristles covering his cheeks. “Okay, maybe I have to do that. Maybe there’s no choice. But that doesn’t mean I’ve gotta do that
to you.
Never to
you.
I want to look after
you
while we’re here. That’s what I want, okay? And you, too, Ted. It should be about you, and me, and Ted.”

Dottie scrunched herself into the pillow. “This seems like a really nice resort . . . But I feel so sick.”

“Drink that Perrier.”

Dottie sipped from the bottle obediently. After a moment, she burped. “Oh, God, that’s just so awful.”

“You’ll get better,” Van said knowingly. “You just rest. Ted and I will go off to the Great House for a little bit. We’ll bring you back, like, a nice slice of lime and the fruit plate.”

Dottie put the pillow over her face.

Van left, carrying his son on his hip. They forged across an open field, past a pergola laden with vines, across a rolling hedge, and uphill to a pillared and porticoed historic mansion. It was a warm late March day, smelling of April. The weather was favoring them. Van put his laminated ID badge over his neck. He walked upstairs, past white pillars, carved doors, and a spiral staircase. He entered the ongoing conference. The event was formally titled “The Joint Strategic Summit for Critical Cyber-Security Practice,” with a hyphen. It was amazing how much discussion there had been inside the CCIAB about that stupid hyphen.

Ted was the only child-in-arms attending the Joint Strategic Summit. Ted immediately became the star of the show. Van was surprised by this. Van had planned to take a very low profile at the event, which was really Jeb’s show all the way. But Ted, shiny-faced and gleeful, was upstaging all the pundits, movers, and shakers. Dignified men and women with graying hair and American flag lapel pins could not keep their hands off Ted. It was as if Van had created Ted as a high-tech animatronic toddler. Van had become used to government and industry people sucking up to him a little. He knew that it wasn’t personal. It was his job title that got those firm handshakes, those invitations, and all that flattering mail. He was the Deputy Director for Technical Services of the Coordination of Critical Information Assurance Board. For a brief period, mostly while stuck inside a concrete vault in West Virginia, Van had been able to assess some of their stupidest ideas and technologies, and thank God, to quickly get rid of some of them.

Van offered Ted a juicy chunk of cantaloupe off a giant cut-crystal fruit plate. Ted, who had a tiny but effective set of choppers now, went after it with gusto.

Here was a familiar face. It was Pico Yang. The unusually named Pico Yang had been a Stanford colleague of Van’s. He was one of the ten guys on the planet who understood Grendel’s operating system. Pico had an Irish wife and four Chinese-Irish kids. Pico didn’t seem much impressed by one Ted. Pico had plenty of Teds.

“You gotta tell me about this aircraft guidance demo. That sounds like a miracle.”

Van leveled with him at once. “The flight OS is crap. The latency problems are nontrivial. The multipath effects killed us. It only works on line of sight. That kludge we stuck together doesn’t even qualify as an alpha rollout.”

Pico beamed upon him. “That’s great news, Van. For one terrible moment I thought I was forty years behind.”

“It’s possible to build one that works. If you’ve got a spare fleet of satellites and sixty billion.”

“California state budget,” Pico said. “The school is taking it in the neck. Neutron-bomb buildings all over Silicon Valley. Worst financial crisis since World War II. You left California at a great time, Van. You wouldn’t recognize us if you came back now.”

“It’s tough, Pico.”

“Lots of states. Not just us.”

“It’s
real
tough.”

“Plus the war. I couldn’t believe it when you went into defense work, but, Van, you were way ahead of the curve. Good for you, man. Real smart move. Great job with the Grendel, too. The streams, Van. Wow. The way you handled streaming, that just knocked me out.” Pico gulped heartily from a tapered glass of white wine. “That’s a cute kid.”

There was nothing Van could do for Pico now. Maybe earlier—but not now. They had thrown Van out of the Vault because the CCIAB was on the point of expiring. Leaving the Vault was like getting paroled from federal prison. At the same time, though, for a Vault rat, that message was unmistakable. Go get lost, fella. Uncle Sam no longer needs you. You can go fry now.

There was Tony Carew over there, smiling, charming, eagerly pressing the flesh. Tony was chatting with a circle of spellbound federal officials. Tony had crashed the big party on Van’s ticket, but Tony looked completely at ease inside Erlette House. Tony looked like he attended Joint Strategic Summits for Critical Cyber-Security Practice every other Tuesday.

Van turned away from Tony and Tony’s eager new friends. No one would ever cling to him like that. Van pretended to study a large white foamboard announcing the Summit’s panel topics. “The Department of Homeland Security: A Historic Creation.” “National Milestones for Proactive Software Protection.” “A Robust and Resilient Critical Infrastructure: The National Infrastructure Assurance Partnership.” “Sharing Vulnerability Analysis Within a Competitive Environment: The Delicate Balance.”

Van was not going to any of these panels, although he personally knew the vast majority of the panelists. Van had already skipped the event’s keynote. It had been delivered by the Secretary of Transportation. It wasn’t that these were boring topics or boring people. They were a lot less boring than they had been made to sound. The stark truth was that these panels had nothing to tell Van that Van didn’t already know.

Now, finally, after months of ceaseless labor in the trenches, Van really understood what he had been up against all along.

He understood all the crushing issues that had prevented decent, well-meaning people from ever getting anything useful done in national computer security.

Problem number one: there was no such thing as a “national” computer. At all. That was a contradiction in terms, like talking about a black sun or a square triangle. You could put a flag decal on the side of a computer. You could hide it in a military base. You could pay for it with taxpayer money. But talking about “American” computation was like talking about “American” mathematics or “American” physics. It just didn’t come with flags.

National people were the wrong people to attempt that security job. A nation, any nation, was just too small. Any cable map could show you the enormous fiber-optic pipes that circled the planet. Tycom Transatlantic, Emergia, Americas-II, Africa ONE, Southern Cross, FLAG Europe-Asia. Pipes laid across the planet’s sea bottom at fantastic expense and effort. Specifically built to reach distant, extremely un-American places. Places like Santiago, Capetown, Mumbai, Perth, Shanghai, and Kuwait City. Places chock-full of alien computers owned by very un-American people. The whole
point of the effort
was to become less American. That was why it was called Internet instead of USA-Net. It was possible to build nets inside your own nation that only your nation could use. France had tried it: Minitel. Britain had tried it: Prestel. National networks died horribly. It was like trying to build a computer net that only talked to Milwaukee.