The zenith angle (35 page)

Wimberley stared at Van. “You can really grab jets out of the sky?”

Van nodded.

“Who the hell are you?” Wimberley demanded. He was shaking. “Where did you come from? What world is this?”

“As long as he’s on our side, what difference does that make?” said Hickok. “It’s time to settle the hash of the Space Invaders here. Hey, Fred! Did you make that Indian Special Ops guy, that actor with the pecs and the biceps?”

“I saw him,” growled Gonzales. “Those Indians sure like ’em pretty. I hate a pretty spook.”

“That actor is the pilot up there. Check this out.” Hickok slapped at his joystick. The jet careened violently. “He’s a real hot dog, isn’t he? He loves to push the envelope!”

“No need to be cornball,” said Gonzales. “Special Ops are ‘the Quiet Professionals.’ So fly them straight out into middle of the Pacific. Fuel runs out, then they go straight into the drink. That’s quick and it’s quiet.”

“The middle of the Pacific is way beyond radio range,” said Hickok. “And that’s too slow. I’m thinking a fast power dive straight onto the top of that mountain yonder.”

“We are letting them go,” Van told him.

“What?” Hickok demanded. “Then why did we just catch ’em?”

“We are letting them go because only punk-ass al Qaeda losers crash airplanes. We caught them to show that we can catch them. We have destroyed the space weapon here. They see that. We own them. They know that. They have no idea who we are. They only know that we are in America, and that we own them. If we kill them now, that sends a message. It says that their resistance matters, so we want to kill them. If we send them back to their bosses, then they
become
our message.”

“What the heck kind of message is that?” said Hickok. “Can’t we just wipe ’em out? That would do.”

“That message is: Our command of technology is beyond conventional military resistance. The conventional military struggle between nations no longer matters. We are the agents from a new geopolitical arena. It’s time to carry out our struggles in a new, improved way.”

“What kind of cockamamie war doctrine is that?” Hickok demanded.

“It’s cyberwar!” said Wimberley.

“It’s information warfare,” said Gonzales. “It’s like media spin or something. Am I right?”

“They are human beings in there,” said Van. “We need to convince them of something important right now. They need to believe that it’s cyberwar or it’s bloody-handed terror suicide, and those are the only kind of wars that get allowed. Now we can make that distinction clear to them. Let them fly back home, Mike.”

“Okay,” said Hickok. “I know that you know that. What I wanna know is
—how
do you know that?”

“I was inside that plane once,” Van said. “That’s how I know.”

PENTAGON CITY, SEPTEMBER 2002

Van woke up. It was his birthday. He stared at the cigarette-stained ceiling. This was pretty sure to be the worst birthday of his life.

The federal refund money for the Grendel system had finally come in. That was the pool of cash that he and Dottie were both living on. This was a small miracle, and he was grateful for it, because the CCIAB

no longer existed. Quick, quiet, and done with its work, it was not even a Washington memory. Just another blue-ribbon panel, offering wisdom to power. It was as if Van’s labors had never been. Van had never expected such a strange reaction from Washington’s establishment. He had run a black-bag operation, shot a man, blown up a multimillion-dollar scientific instrument, and captured and released highly placed agents from two foreign intelligence agencies. Van had imagined that they might either arrest him, and put him on trial, or they would give him a secret medal. It had never occurred to Van that he would blow their minds so badly that they would do nothing at all. The ruined observatory was, officially, the victim of an accidental fire. Officially, Tony Carew had vanished. Better yet, he had vanished in India. Strange news about Tony was all over the Bollywood film magazines. According to the tabloids, he had vanished on a hunting trip to the Himalayas. Nobody had gone to India to look for Tony. Nobody seemed to care about a ruined entrepreneur from the Bubble. He’d been a star’s plaything and once she had dumped him, there was nothing left of him but a kind of black vacuum.

Derek Vandeveer was also a nonperson. Jeb had a new job handling security with eBay. Fawn had a nice federal post. Michael Hickok, as a policy, never explained to anyone what he was doing. Van was left alone. Van’s phone did not ring with eager job offers. His e-mail bore no pleas and flattering invitations. Van wasn’t looking for any job in computer security, anyway. Van wasn’t exactly looking for much of anything, really. He was searching.

He was running a small Web log. Nobody seemed to understand Web logs yet. Van had one. It was a quiet, fast-paced Web log. He used it to absorb and spread ideas. Van’s Web log involved genuine issues. The genuine issues were the issues that political people lacked clichés for. Web logs interested Van. There was no money in them, yet, and the political campaigners were just catching on. Web logs were in combat for attention. That was the most interesting thing about them. Combat for attention. War of ideas.

In his deep exile, Van was doing a lot of reading. His field of study was war. He was reading Clausewitz. Clausewitz was a dolt. He was reading Lidell-Hart. Lidell-Hart was full of himself. He was reading Miyamoto Musashi. Musashi was a New-Agey Zen mystic. He was reading Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu had some rather interesting stuff going on.

Official Washington was avoiding Van. Van understood this. He was no more welcome to the official power structure than Watergate burglars and Iran-Contra conspirators. Washingtonians avoided such people while the heat was still on them. The wheel moved back around, eventually. Then the malefactors became talk-show hosts.

Van was earning a little pin money by working on a rollout of Bastille Linux. He was also drinking rather a lot. It was hard for a warrior not to drink when he was kept away from the action. He had discovered a fondness for big pint cans of Foster’s Lager. Once he had been bright, whimsical, inventive. Now he was dark, dangerous, inventive.

The loss of her telescope had brought Dottie’s career to a shattering halt. She left Colorado and brought Ted with her to share Van’s life. The family was broke, and living in a tiny, unfurnished duplex in Pentagon City. They had no careers, few prospects, large tax debts, and a host of personal humiliations. They had no offices, and both had to work underfoot in the grimy nook that called itself a living room. That was also where Ted had his playpen.

If times were hard in computer science, they were brutal in astronomy. Dottie’s people were cutting budgets past the bone. Dottie’s blighted résumé included a lot of public relations work for an astronomical facility that had somehow burned down its telescope. Through no fault or intention of her own, Dr. Dottie Vandeveer had wandered into a world of hurt.

Dottie looked pale and drawn lately. Her face was lined, her brown hair showing strands of gray. Van rose from the bed. He showered, ignoring the mildew in the grout. He went into the soot-stained kitchen in a T-shirt and underwear.

The four new chairs in the kitchen had red bows on them.

“Happy birthday, honey,” Dottie told him.

“Wow,” Van blurted. “Magnesium chairs!”

“You like them?”

“They are the best!”

“I got them secondhand for you!” Dottie crowed. “Barely used! They were so cheap!”

Van sat in one of the metal chairs. His ass felt metallic and cold through his white cotton underwear, but the chairs had always been a lot more comfortable than they looked. “Four of them, wow!” he said loudly. He sipped his instant coffee. “That’s just great! You are so good to me, babe.” He nibbled some burnt toast.

Dottie perched in one of the chairs. “Derek,” she said shyly.

Van looked at his wife. He knew instantly, in his gut, that Dottie was about to tell him something dreadful. She was using her kindest, sweetest voice, the kind she used when tactfully urging him toward something that would have great rusty fangs like a bear trap. Dottie looked pained and greenish—she’d hardly been eating in the mornings, maybe a sip of coffee, a nibble off a stale doughnut. He had married a proud, shy, lonely, vulnerable young woman with an intellectual gift. And now, in his care, and due to him, she was reduced to . . . what? She was a soldier’s wife, he thought. A woman who made do. He was one of the world’s secret soldiers. They had become hard, gritty, wounded people with bitter lines around their mouths. What did the future offer them?

“Derek, something important has happened . . .”

Van moved to the edge of his new chair. “What?”

“You’re going to have me around a whole lot. You’re going to have me on your hands all the time.”

Dottie rubbed her forehead. “This is my birthday present for you, but you’re really going to have to put up with me now, honey . . .”

What on earth was the woman rattling on about? Why didn’t she cut to the chase?

“Derek, I’m pregnant.”

Van absorbed this input. Where was Ted? he thought instantly. Ted really needed to hear this news. This was going to be of enormous importance to Ted.

“I know this is a bad time for us to have a baby . . . But, you know, the only job offer I’ve got is in Denmark . . . Oh, God, Derek, I’ve been so careless and stupid . . . I can’t believe that happened. It just ruins everything. After all this, things are so bad for us, and now I’m pregnant.” Dottie burst into sobs. Van felt something extraordinary happening within him. A dead black crust was breaking open. He had known no word for that feeling until it began to lift away from him under tremendous internal pressure. But now he knew what that feeling had been. It was grief. It was grief. Now the black grief was receding from him. It was blasting away from his heart at half the speed of light. Something inside him that had been tiny and sparklike and bitterly embattled was expanding like a vast red star.

He was huge inside. He glowed and burned. He had gravity.

“Baby, that is great news. You are saving our lives here.”

Dottie lifted her head. Her morale was in visible ruins. “I get so sick, with that morning sickness. I get so helpless . . .”

“This is the best birthday gift I’ve ever had.”

She blinked in disbelief. “You really think so?”

“I don’t think so. I know so. Four people in our family, that is like a little squad. We’ll get really quick, and stop complaining so much from now on. We’ll change our lazy habits. We’ll get things done whenever they need to get done.”

“Derek, this will ruin our careers.”

“No it won’t. Your career will move right on. You will take that job in Denmark. I will look after our kids.”

Dottie’s eyes widened. “We’re moving to Denmark?”

“Yeah. We’re gonna sell everything here and we’ll move to Europe. Right away.”

A hectic flush rose to Dottie’s cheeks. “What, even these chairs? But I just bought us this furniture.”

“Honey, Europe is well known for its furniture. These are European chairs.”

“What about
your
career, Derek?”

“I know what I’m doing. Honey, it is senseless for intelligent people not to have children. Why would I want to vote against the future? What we need is a good strategy. And I’ve got one for us. You will work. I will stay home with the children.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“You’d make that sacrifice for us?”

“What sacrifice? I love the idea of two kids. I need this. It’ll be broadening for me. Am I nailed here in Washington, for any reason? I can hit aRETURN key anywhere in the world.”

Though it was his birthday, Dottie needed consoling. He lavished some on her. That worked. Dottie was still weeping in happiness as they lay in bed together. Van stared silently at the ceiling. It was a very good move for him to get out of Washington. A lateral move, very Liddell-Hart, very Sun Tzu. When power avoided you, a counteravoidance move lured power back in. His wife didn’t need to know this, but the Administration had way too many people like himself, wandering loose. Now that Van had learned, by startling counterexamples, something about sound and competent governance, he was very aware that the Terror was just the Bubble by another name. It was just as wild, just as turbulent, and just as unlikely to last. No government that was not desperate and totally winging it ever, ever would have asked Dr. Derek Vandeveer to become a warrior. And yet he had done just that. Odder yet, he had grown to understand the war. He had the scars to prove it. He had become the kind of person who could shift a world’s destiny through acts of organized violence.

He had become a professional. And his profession was always going to be something that didn’t quite exist. The profession of cyberwarrior was always mostly going to be about lying low. The indirect approach, as Liddell-Hart liked to put it. The leak. The putsch within darkness. The patient stalking. The compilation of databases. The cybernetic awareness. The brief and devastating strike. And the silent exfiltration. And the wait.

The Terror was merely an overexcited phase, and like the Bubble, it was going to burst of its own hype. And when it did pop, it would be a rather good thing not to be visibly holding the bag. To be, say, a low-key house husband living in distant Europe. Raising two little kids. Two days later, as he was watching the bidding for his possessions on eBay, Van’s phone rang.

“Vandeveer.”

The voice on the phone was distant and laggy. “Van? Kind of a blast from the past here. This is Jimmie Matson! You remember me? We used to work together!”

Van paused. He could place the voice before the memory came. Of course. Jimmie Matson at Mondiale. His top lab exec. Why hadn’t Jimmie from Mondiale just said “It’s me, Jimmie from Mondiale”? Of course, Van realized, Jimmie had his reasons not to say such things. Nobody from Mondiale ever said “Mondiale” now.

“Of course I remember you, Jimmie. What’s up?”

“So, I just saw on your Web log that you’re thinking of moving to Denmark! Well, I’m here in Switzerland.”

“How come?”