The zenith angle (30 page)

The plane dipped violently. Tony whooped in glee. “And that Cyberspace Force, who had such nice brochures . . . They are not even an idea now. They are not even the idea of an idea. They are buried like Pompeii under eighteen solid meters of volcanic ash. What happened there, huh? Dr. Vandeveer happened, that’s what.”

“Look,” Van protested, “I know that you told me to stay away from that satellite . . .”

“I know, I know, Jeb was real ambitious. You guys just couldn’t stay out of the loop on the KH-13. But let me tell you how all that plays to the people at this event, Van. How it looks is, the Cyberspace Force went down and dirty on you, and the CCIAB went down and dirty right back. And there was some kind of encounter. And you came back from that, and your boss kisses you in public. And they
don’t
come back, and their boss gets broken like a breadstick. So everyone claps real loud for you. They clap till their hands get sore. Because they are terrified of you, man. You are their stud cyberwar general. You are the geek who killed and ate some real military. You rock.”

“That’s not at all how it really was.”

Tony sighed. “Who even cares? You’re never going to tell them the truth about beating up some wacky little soldier inside your apartment. And neither am I, or anybody else, ever. The point is that a cyberwar needs heroes. There aren’t a lot of cyber-heroes around. In fact, you’re pretty much the only one in the world.”

The ground was coming up outside the window. “Michael Hickok wasn’t like you said he was, either, Tony. What you said about Hickok was all hype. I hired that guy.”

“Van, that was okay, too. I still think that guy is evil, but if Hickok chose to jump ship and join your side, then he’s smarter than I thought. Hickok is a goon, but if he’s
your
goon, that’s terrific. I can trust your judgment there. When it comes to cyberwar, you’re the best around. Really. You just are.”

Van wiped sweat from his forehead. “Tony, why are you angling this?”

“Because your scene is where the action is, brother. This event of yours has been very good to me. The Internet boom is history, but there’s still money in security, and there will be a lot more once people knuckle down and shape up. Thanks to you, a ten-billion-dollar boondoggle is finally on the ropes. That KH-13 is facing cancellation. And that is great news. It’s a new day now. We’re gonna put that kind of bureaucratic bloat behind us, and move right on. Nobody cares about gold-plated Cadillac satellites in a real shooting war. It’s all about rapid point-and-shoot now, that’s the new trend. It’s all about Predators. And, Van, you and I just proved to everybody watching us that we can turn Boeing’s biggest private business jet into a giant remote-control Predator. I’m a very proud and happy guy to know you, Dr. Vandeveer. This is working out brilliantly.”

The jet touched down. It jounced violently and became airborne again. Luggage compartments flapped open and there was a distant crashing from the galley. Then the wheels hit with a screech. The end of the runway rushed upon them. Straps bit into Van’s chest and gut. The jet stopped. The engines died. Hot metal cooled and ticked.

“Yahoo,” Tony murmured. “Yahoo-dot-com.”

Floodlights flicked over the runway. Van saw to his horror that an enthusiastic crowd was surging toward the plane. Tony laughed aloud. “Van, look at ’em! You are a movie star!”

“I’ll have to give them some kind of speech,” Van realized.

“Van, a great tech demo can save any situation. And you just gave them one. This is a victory speech. I’ll jot you down a couple talking points.”

Van was awake inside the Lake Cottage. He felt too elevated to sleep. Dottie was sleeping in the featherbed. A tendril of brown hair was glued to her forehead with sweat. The woman should never take Dramamine and also drink white wine, thought Van kindly. It really made her manic.

So funny that Tony Carew somehow imagined that his actress girlfriend was his wild angel. That woman was playing a phony role, that was obvious. While Dottie, who had been married to him for ten years, had found her inner tigress.

Van had never imagined Dottie for a gossip, but it seemed that her work in public relations had turned her head around. In just one evening mingling with the Joint Summit crowd, Dottie had wormed out a host of inside stories that Van had never heard or even dreamed of. This stuff was all cocktail blather, obviously, but it was about
himself.

People from outside the CCIAB had notions about him that were wildly divorced from reality. They knew that he lived in a slum, but they thought he had chosen to live there because he liked to beat up crooks. People thought he had a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. They knew for a fact that he carried a high-tech gun. He was supposed to be hacking into foreign computers every week. He was recruiting Special Forces people, breaking into terrorist facilities and installing Trojan Horses and fatal viruses. Also, supposedly, he was having an affair with Fawn.

This bizarre tittle-tattle might have upset Van, except that Jeb was catching it even worse. Jeb had a whole set of legends attached to him, like a shark followed by remora fish. Jeb had heart arrhythmias. He had advanced diabetes. He’d had a fistfight with Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice had had to break it up (this was the best story, actually). Jeb got anxious phone calls three times a day from Larry Ellison. Jeb had a Republican Party slush fund. Jeb had hired Cuban exiles to wiretap the French Embassy. Jeb was addicted to Halcion pills. Jeb was secretly gay.

He, Derek R. Vandeveer, had become the toughest, scariest cyberwarrior in Washington. It made Van wonder if he had ever understood anything about any other human being in his life. Was he delusional?

Maybe, when it came to computers,
everyone in the world
was delusional. On a number of occasions, Van had met the President of the United States. This poor guy even had his own military acronym: POTUS. In real life, Van had met an affable Texan baseball fan in his fifties who liked nothing better than eating pretzels and watching a few innings on the ol’ boob tube. He had twin teenage daughters who gave him a lot of grief. This was the President of the United States. Somehow this was the very same guy as the remorseless military war chief who was relentlessly crushing the world’s most feared and respected mountain bandits.

And now he had even met James Cobb. Van opened his laptop bag and retrieved Cobb’s business card. For Van, this had been the true highlight of the Virginia Summit. It had moved him deeply that a man he had once idolized had recognized him as a colleague.

Up popped Cobb’s Web site. It wasn’t a site at all, just a series of retrievable files, like in the good old days when the ARPANET had been the info highway for engineers. No spam then. No porn. No commerce. No viruses. The watering hole for tech wizards. ARPA, Stanford, MIT. Bolt Beranek and Newman. UCLA, Xerox PARC, IBM, and RAND. Those were just labels really. Labels for the same few dozen tech guys, little teams of ten and twenty scientists, nice and quiet, really quick, supplying what was needed whenever the need came up . . .

All those Cobb papers from the seventies and eighties . . . In his heyday, the guy was publishing like crazy. He was throwing off ideas like a blowtorch spat out sparks. Conference proceedings on three different continents. James Cobb was literally all over the map. Not just in one discipline, either. Cobb was making connections that no one before him had ever thought to make. He was using systems analysis and information theory to slice through the rest of human knowledge like a layer cake. It was like he had three brains inside one head.

Van could still remember the mind-blown tingle he and Tony Carew had felt in their MIT dorm as they looked through Cobb’s work. They would sit up together at night, getting steadily drunker on the new intellectual frontiers this guy was violently forcing open . . .

And in looking at the papers, Van realized with an adult shock that most of them had gone nowhere at all. Cobb had had a whole lot of really sexy notions that just did not play out in the real world. Van himself was older now. He could recognize the work of Cobb’s youth as a young man’s fancies. Van had a further insight. It crept up on him like a kind of dread. For the first time, he recognized a kind of emotional distress in what Cobb had done. These ideas were not just freely pouring out of Jim Cobb. They had been squeezed out of him. There was something primal and animalistic about Cobb’s huge burst of creativity. Maybe it had satisfied him, maybe he took pride in it, but his act of mastery had hurt him, it had cost him. James Cobb had paid a human price for his science. He had paid some pitiful, heavy dues, like a master of the blues guitar.

Van looked at his watch. It was almost 2:00A.M. Suddenly he wanted to drop everything. He wanted to seek out Jim Cobb as he slept in his Erlette House room. He wanted to wake Cobb up, to tell him that he had achieved enlightenment. He was no longer a student. He truly
understood.
He wanted to become the man’s friend.

Van looked at the computer screen, his heart thudding with inspiration. Of course he could not find Cobb’s peaceful room, pound the door in, and wake him up, shouting frantically. No, that would be senseless. He would send Cobb a professional e-mail. Nothing frantic, nothing weird and geeky. The master addresses his fellow master. Very cool. Very considerate.

A technical note. That would do it. Something that he and Cobb could share together. Co-authoring a new paper, maybe. Wow. A great idea, that would be fantastic. After all, the guy had practically invited Van to help him. He could breathe fresh life into something that Cobb had left on the side of the road. It would be like a Festschrift tribute. That should be easy. There was so much there to choose from. Van’s fingers hovered over his keyboard.

Cobb, James A. (1981) ADAPTIVELY PULSED LOW-POWER EMISSIONS IN MASSIVELY

PARALLEL COLLIMATION.
Prospectives in Tunable Bandgaps,
Conference of the Max Planck Society, Ringberg Castle, Germany.

He clicked on it. What was this paper, again? Doing something weird and off the wall by tuning laser bandgaps. It seemed to him that maybe Tony had spoken of it once, ages ago. Tony had always had a fondness for Cobb’s wildest, most out-there notions.

Very weak photonic clusters. Digitally packetized. Reflectively collimated in real time into massively parallel beams . . .

Half an hour later, Van left Dottie sleeping in the suite and walked out under the quiet Virginia stars. He opened his cell phone.

Hickok answered at once. It was almost 3:00A.M., but there was massive party racket in the background, and Hickok was drunk. “Hey, Van! Come on down and join us by the pool! These AFOXAR guys love you!”

“Mike, I know it’s late, but I need you. Right away.”

Hickok was crestfallen. His voice had sobered. “So, what, you didn’t like my piloting today?”

“Mike, this is spacewar.”

THIRTEEN

THE ALFRED A. GRIFFITH INTERNATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL FACILITY, COLORADO,

L
ook, it’s simple,” said Hickok. “Van is the strategic leader. I am the tactical leader.”

“Dr. Vandeveer’s a civilian,” Gonzales objected.

“Cyberwar is our brand-new kind of war, dude. I’m a civilian. You’re a civilian. He’s a civilian. The enemy are civilians. We’re all civilians.”

“I didn’t even
want
to be a civilian,” said Wimberley. “I got a dishonorable discharge. You know what that did to my job prospects?”

The four of them were sitting at midnight, in the mountains of Colorado, in the back of a rented camper-truck. The camper was parked off-road and hidden under a camouflage net. Van wore a black silk shirt, black cargo pants, a black leather jacket. He had a black shoulder bag, black socks, and black Rockport walking shoes. Van didn’t normally dress like a New York humanities professor, but it would do. If he was caught breaking into the premises of the Alfred A. Griffith International Astronomical Facility, he had a good cover story.

After all, he was Mr. Dottie Vandeveer. He was an old college buddy of the guy who ran the place. There was nothing in Van’s shoulder bag that couldn’t pass close inspection. Black gloves, black woven hat—well, it got cold up here. Earpiece and mike—that was just a cell phone. Digital recorder, videocam, big deal. Laptop, he always had a laptop with him. He was a computer scientist. The other three cyberwar infiltrators looked like the Mutant Ninja Turtles from Mars. Hickok, Gonzales, and Wimberley were impossibly scary. Van was used to it now—it had been his idea—but he could hardly bear to look at them. Their monster helmets had inbuilt night-vision goggles. They were big pointed Cyclops snouts with matching counterweights in the back. They had faceless black ski masks of fireproof Nomex. They owned the night in their shapeless black battle jackets, black combat pants, black Kevlar gloves, and black lace-up SWAT boots. They had great big black humpbacked ALICE packs. They looked like three giant black plastic action figures. Any normal man who saw these three trolls stalking past him in darkness would assume that they were hallucinations. The odd part was that none of it was even official U.S. military gear. It had all been bought or rented off the shelf, from various mil-spec commercial suppliers. None of it was even secret. Except for the loaded AFOCI burglar case that Van had brought from Washington.

“Sure you don’t want to take the case with you?” Van asked Wimberley. The kid was looking shaky.

“We could bungee it right to that ALICE pack.”

“I don’t deserve to carry it,” Wimberley sniveled. “I got my ass kicked over that fair and square.”

What was it gonna take to cheer this kid up? “There’s fifteen grand waiting for you in a bus locker in Boulder.”

“That helps,” Wimberley admitted. “That’s gonna help me a whole lot.”

Van was spending the down payment on a house in order to invade, burgle, wiretap, and hack his wife’s workplace. Van wasn’t quite sure why this cyberwar operation was worth forty-five thousand dollars to him, plus the rental for the gear, the truck, and the airline tickets. Van had almost crawled out from the shadow of total financial disaster. This misadventure had put him right back in. Not to mention that agent-running his own unapproved black-bag operation was eighteen different kinds of illegal.