Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  The Beckwiths said nothing for a moment. Behind them the television played silently. A reporter was interviewing a student wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a hand with a raised middle finger and the words “I would prefer not to.”

  Virgil stood with a small grunt, walked over to the sideboard in the dining room, and picked up a model of a spacecraft that measured a couple of feet wide by a couple of feet tall. He lifted it with care, carried it back, and offered it to Hadley. The agent angled his head inquiringly to be certain he could lay his hands on the thing.

  “Just be careful,” Virgil said.

  Hadley took the model and looked at it with open admiration. It was deceptively light, made of balsa or some other type of thin wood, but painted and enamelized to appear metallic. It was exquisitely assembled—plainly hand-cut rather than laser-cut because only a hand could manage this wood the way it had been managed. Where there was a deep flaw in the grain causing a tiny bump at a seam, there would be an equally tiny dimple cut into the adjoining piece to accommodate the irregularity. The spacecraft’s delicate antenna components were assembled from shavings of wood that were no thicker than toothpicks. The nameplate on the base of the model read, “Voyager 1.”

  “You built this?” Hadley asked.

  “We built it,” Virgil corrected. “Mae and I, in the first year after we retired, just to keep our hands busy. And we helped build that one too,” he added, gesturing roughly skyward.

  “How far away is it now?”

  “Thirteen billion miles. Been up there since shortly after Belka was born, and it’ll be flying forever.”

  Virgil took the model from Hadley, walked it back to the dining room, and replaced it on the sideboard. By the time he turned around, Mae was standing and Hadley had taken that as his cue to stand too.

  “Agent Hadley,” Virgil said, “we know you had to make this visit, but we cannot help you. Mae and I, we’ve done our remarkable things. Now our daughter is doing hers.”

  “You know Washington will take steps,” Hadley said. “Against her, against you.”

  The Beckwiths nodded their understanding, and Mae opened the door to show Hadley out. He exited and she shut the door behind him. Across the room, the countdown clock on the silent TV continued to roll.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  September 3

  Whatever the presidents of Brazil and the United States had hoped was going to happen in the week that followed the great burnings of August 26 was surely not what did happen. Jair Bobo-deCorte could tell himself at first that all was going as planned. He had herded the people he wanted to herd and seized the land he wanted to seize and was already deeding the huge, burned parcels to the ranchers, miners, and other developers who would pay richly for the use of what had once been the homes of the now-scattered tribes.

  The president of the United States at first seemed too to have gotten what he wanted. Public sentiment in favor of intervention in the Amazon basin had spiked in the first twenty-four hours after the burnings, but then—news cycles being news cycles and distractable Americans being distractable Americans—passions cooled and attentions shifted and the Amazon returned to a matter that was just another nation’s business. That helped ensure that, for now at least, the majorities the president enjoyed in both houses of Congress would hold, still backing his policy of standing aside and letting Brazil handle Brazil.

  But that was just the piece of the story they could easily see—and wanted to see. If Laurel Cady’s studies of the great domestic uprisings of the past had taught her anything, it was that people in power could be badly losing even when they thought they were winning. The Montgomery buses ran indifferently along, with all their rules about which people could sit in which seats—until all at once the pressure built and the lid blew off and everything changed. The colonial tea tax was paid—until all at once it wasn’t. And Ohio industries went right ahead pouring their wastes wherever they wanted until one day a river in Cleveland caught fire and twenty million people in all fifty states took to the streets and said enough was enough. The tea drinkers had been grumbling and the bus riders fuming and the twenty million people stirring slowly to action all along, but the people who would feel their wrath paid them little heed.

  Now the September 18 Coalition was rising the same way, with more than two million people signed up to appear in Washington for the congressional vote and similar local demonstrations planned in all of the nation’s major cities as well as many smaller ones. Cady, a scholar of America’s great civil uprisings, was about to become the author of what could be the largest of all.

  Alone in space, the holdout astronaut continued to do her part to keep the movement galvanized. Every time the station flew over the jungle, she was positioned at Zoe and Ivy for the entire pass, scanning the ground for the smallest sign of military mobilization. Whenever fires were lit—and many were—she captured images of them at their greatest magnification and resolution and streamed them down to Earth, both alerting the world to what was happening and warning the people in the path of the flames to get away.

  “President Bobo plays with matches,” she tweeted when a fire looked small and she could afford to be flip.

  “Blaze at Tapauá, winds southeast,” she tweeted at the first flicker of a bigger fire, with similar notifications following as the attacks moved on—to Juburi or Abunaí or Mamori—and the winds shifted with them.

  On a few occasions, Beckwith delighted the activists and infuriated Brasilia when she spotted Bobo-deCorte’s helicopters and earthmovers just as they were roaring into position for another attack, and sent those pictures down to Earth. She watched as the machines stopped and then pulled back, and she showed the world the evidence of the retreat.

  “Can’t hide from the eye in the sky,” she taunted the Brazilian president. #CantHideFromWalli, came the hashtag.

  The Brazilian forces were, of course, perfectly capable of planning their advances for the moments when the station would not be passing by—anyone in the world could download the same space station app Sonia had on her phone—but the military mobilized slowly and the station moved fast and Beckwith was almost always out ahead of the operations.

  The risk did exist that Bobo-deCorte could try to strike back at Beckwith in the worst way possible—through Sonia. But that was unlikely. If the Brazilian president even knew that Beckwith had a niece in the jungle, she was one small figure lost in a vast expanse of rain forest, and the only people who knew her actual whereabouts were the officials from the SSA, who surely wouldn’t share the information with Brasilia. What’s more, Bobo-deCorte was no fool. He might have the American president’s friendship, but that same American president was under growing pressure to crush his Consolidation. Harming or even detaining an American national—to say nothing of the niece of an American folk hero—would force the White House’s military hand and bring down US hellfire.

  The only way to keep Beckwith and her spying under control was thus a simple if extreme one: NASA could sever her internet link entirely—something that could be accomplished by a single touch on a single icon on the Capcom’s screen in Mission Control. But just as Bobo-deCorte dared not mess with Sonia, NASA dared not silence Walli. For one thing, her millions of followers would not abide it, and additional demonstrations had already been planned around the country if the stream of communication from space should suddenly fall silent. The sites of the protests would be the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the space agency’s headquarters on E Street Southwest in Washington, and the New York Stock Exchange—simply because any unrest on Wall Street rattled markets, and rattled markets would in turn rattle the president. Similar demonstrations were also planned in front of the Supreme Court Building, in Washington. It was that site that was likeliest to stay NASA’s hand.

  Already lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union had gone to work, writing, releasing
, and preparing to file First Amendment claims in federal courts in Texas, Florida, and Washington, seeking an immediate ruling that Beckwith’s downlink—effectively her means of speech—be restored immediately if it were severed. Beckwith herself had joined in advance as a party to the suits, ensuring that the claim would have standing; so had the students who were organizing the rallies and multiple indigenous-peoples civil rights groups, arguing that Beckwith was their voice and most effective channel for being heard.

  Cady appeared in on-camera remotes on various network news shows, sharing a split screen with a NASA spokesman once the word of the ACLU action got out. She had expected this to happen and had prepared for it.

  “Astronauts flew for decades before there even was internet or email,” the spokesman argued. “NASA is under no obligation to provide them now and could shut the line at will.”

  “NASA was under no obligation to provide them,” Cady corrected. “But once a means of speech has been provided, the government—which includes NASA—cannot withdraw it based on its content.”

  “Is she right?” the newscaster asked the spokesman.

  “I’m right,” Cady said. “Don’t ask him.”

  She was right. A case like this fit so neatly into the apron pocket of the First Amendment that Connie Polk herself called Joe Star and asked him not even to try to muzzle Beckwith. “You’d have a court order demanding you restore the link inside of an hour,” she said. “And you’d only make my job harder, appealing the whole thing up the federal ladder.”

  Eavesdropping on Beckwith’s conversations with her parents and Sonia or reading their emails was similarly availing the government little. Agent Hadley had been right that that would require a warrant, and Beckwith’s mother had been right in guessing the government had already secured one. But all of the Beckwiths took care to keep their conversations anodyne against just that possibility—simply checking in on one another’s welfare. The closest anyone on the ground had come to colluding with the renegade astronaut was when Sonia and Raymond set up Beckwith’s Twitter account, which came right back to the First Amendment turf Cady and the ACLU had so neatly covered.

  With their hands tied, NASA and the Navy were reduced to formally ordering Beckwith to stop her “unauthorized surveillance of the jungle and dissemination of classified information.” The State and Defense Departments, under whose command she did not serve, issued a similar demand—though not making it an order, because they did not have that power.

  “I would prefer not to,” Beckwith responded. And within minutes, that hashtag, which had already been everywhere since the day she first seized the station, once again swamped the internet.

  * * *

  • • •

  There were enough cars in front of the elegant house off Belmont Road in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, DC, that Connie Polk figured she had a reasonable chance of slipping inside unnoticed. The press, at least the society press and the political press, were everywhere, but they weren’t looking for her. They were looking for the seven-figure campaign donors and the selected lobbyists and dignitaries who would be here for a fundraising dinner tonight. And, of course, they were looking for the president, though he had already arrived and gone inside, as the Secret Service detail outside made clear.

  Nobody expected the attorney general to attend. She wasn’t on the leaked guest list, which was fine with her because she loathed such cash-for-contact events. But the president had strongly suggested she be here, practically instructed her to be here, and she had agreed, on the condition that she could arrive in a private car with tinted windows and be allowed into the house through a back entrance. A political event like this was simply the wrong look for the job she held. Those conditions were met, and she entered the home through a door that led into a huge chef’s kitchen where live lobsters scrabbled in bushel baskets on the floor and institutional-size pots of water boiled on the sprawling range. From there, she was led to a too-bright dining room where about forty guests were being seated. Almost immediately, the president’s voice called out to her.

  “Connie!” he said. “There’s my AG.”

  She turned toward the table, where he was centrally seated. Joe Star, the administrator of NASA, was to his right, which surprised her. He was largely apolitical, and while he had amassed a fortune in the private sector, it was nowhere near the fortune of the other men in the room. He was here for a reason. The seat to the president’s left was empty, and he patted it.

  “Come, come,” he said, motioning to her. “All for you.”

  Polk winced inwardly. He’d been drinking—she could see that. A mostly empty glass of bourbon was next to him, and from experience, she knew that it was the only one he’d had. He would accept the wine later when it was poured, but aside from a pantomimed sip if there were toasts, he wouldn’t drink it. He knew his limits—one drink loosened him up, and that was plenty. She admired that about him, but she actually preferred him unloosened. She could not reciprocate the near friendliness the bourbon would free up in him, and it would be gone by morning anyway. She took her seat and smiled at him and Star.

  “Mr. President, thank you for inviting me,” she said.

  “Thank you for coming, Connie,” he answered.

  She said hello to Star, addressing him as “Mr. Administrator.” He insisted on Joe; she agreed on the condition that he call her Connie, and the wine was poured.

  By the time the appetizer was served, the president got to the point of the invitation, though he addressed his first remarks to Star, not to Polk. “Your space girl is causing me nothing but headaches,” he said.

  Star seemed to flinch, though Polk couldn’t be sure if it was in reaction to “space girl” or “your”—an accusation of ownership Star could probably do without.

  “Yes, sir,” Star said. “I imagine she is.”

  “The congressional leadership is leaning on me to figure this out, and the Russians couldn’t be happier.”

  “Beg pardon, sir,” Star said, “but the Russians want her off that station as much as we do.”

  “Your space Russians, yes,” the president said. “But the Kremlin is happy for anything that makes me look weak—and this does.” He changed tacks. “Shouldn’t she be starting to crack by now? Isn’t she going stir-crazy all alone up there?”

  “To the contrary, sir,” Star said. “She appears to be having the time of her life.”

  “Can she actually run the whole thing by herself? Any chance she’ll make some mistake and get herself killed?”

  He stopped as soon as he said that and appeared surprised at himself. Without looking down, he pushed the bourbon glass an inch farther away. This was why he didn’t drink.

  “No, sir,” Star said neutrally. “She is more than able to tend to the station.”

  “As I suspected. So what say we bring her home?”

  “We are continuing to try to do that. The Russians are sending up a Soyuz to fetch her.”

  “Any reason to believe she’ll actually get in the thing?”

  “I doubt it. The demonstrators certainly wouldn’t want her to. They’re playing this September 18 thing big.”

  “I bet they’d settle down if she comes home. Connie?” the president said, at last turning to her. “How are we coming on that?”

  “Just as the administrator . . . as Joe says, sir,” she answered. “She’s immovable. Prosecution doesn’t scare her, she knows her NASA career is surely over, and we can push the parents only so hard. They’re law-abiding people and they’re very sympathetic.”

  “How about we give her what she wants, then?” the president said.

  “Sir?” Connie asked.

  “Give her what she wants. Look at the polls. She’s a hero and I’m eating shit for this.”

  Two people across the table turned and looked at him. He glanced directly at the bourbon this time,
accusingly.

  “I try not to worry about the polls, sir.”

  “You should worry,” he said, “if I’m going to keep my job—and you’re going to keep yours. So let’s back off the parents. And let’s ease up on the threats of prosecution. I’ll press the Europeans and Japanese to leave her alone, and you can promise her some minor sentence stateside—naval discharge after a court-martial, maybe a few months of base confinement.”

  “Mr. President,” Connie said, “it’s the Consolidation, not the punishment, that matters to her. She wants it stopped; she wants you to stop it.”

  “So give her that too,” he said.

  Now Polk was truly shocked. The president could see that and looked pleased at his ability to blindside her. He went on.

  “The pro-intervention polls are rising right along with hers, the congressional majority is wobbling, and I need to get this all behind me. So we let it leak that I’m willing to consider a compromise if Congress approves the intervention. The party will demand I kill the bill once it passes, so we make sure it’s veto-proof. Then, for the good of the country and all the rest, I won’t drag it through the courts on constitutional grounds.”

  “I’ve counted the same votes you’ve counted, Mr. President,” Polk said. “There’s not nearly enough to reach the two-thirds to beat a veto. A lot of these party lawmakers will get clobbered at home if they vote for military action, won’t they?”

  “They will. So the whips and leaders on the Hill had better get moving.”

  “I’m surprised, sir,” Polk said.

  “Beckwith will be too, I’d bet.”

  “What about your American Objectives policy?” Polk asked.

  “You mean America First?” the president said with what he intended to be a mischievous smile but struck Polk as more of a leer. “I’m not agreeing to a full-blown war. We keep it light: fire a few missiles, fly a few Thunderbolts over the treetops, see if that scares El Bobo back into his box.”