by Allen Steele
‘Hmm.’ Jessup folded his arms across his chest. ‘Okay. I’ll listen. What are your demands?’
‘First, the United States and the Commonwealth of Independent States will issue formal apologies to each other for their military actions here. Second, the CIS will allow its members of the science team to continue their work here. Third, the participating nations must promise not to allow any more military personnel or equipment on Mars.’ Johnson held up his hands. ‘That’s all.’
‘That’s all.’ Dick Jessup sighed. ‘Well, I’ll communicate your stipulations to the President, but you know you won’t get anywhere with this. All they have to do is send another science team here. They’ll continue the work and your careers will be down the tube.’
Paul Verduin coughed. ‘That will be difficult to do,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of erasing the memory of the hard drives. The data has been relocated to another place where they cannot find it…’
‘What?’
‘And it will be destroyed unless all of our demands are made public and satisfied,’ Johnson finished. ‘If a new team was sent here, they would have to recreate almost two years of research from scratch. I don’t think the Cooties are going to wait that long.’
Jessup stared disbelievingly at Johnson. ‘What about the Cooties? What’s going on?’ Then, for the first time since entering the module, he seemed to notice Ben Cassidy. ‘What happened down there?’
‘Room C4-20 has been solved,’ Kawakami said. ‘Mr Cassidy here has managed to convince the Cooties that we’re a sapient, creative race. That was what the Labyrinth was ultimately designed to prove. It was a mechanism to determine not only whether we were technologically advanced, but also creatively advanced. For what purpose, we don’t yet know…but I doubt they will be patient much longer. Already their robots are working down there.’
Jessup scowled at Kawakami. ‘Robots? As in automechanisms?’
‘Activated when C4-20 was given enough proof of our intelligence. We were looking at this entirely the wrong way. The Cooties already had enough evidence of our empirical knowledge. This time, they wanted assurance that we weren’t just problem-solvers.’ Kawakami smiled. ‘Now they’re tearing down the last walls.’
‘Then why…?’
‘Why were we lured here? Why did they create this series of tests? What did they expect to gain from a complex game which was apparently meant to begin long after they were dead?’ Kawakami closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. ‘I have no idea. Try to understand, Richard, that we’re attempting to comprehend a completely alien perspective, and there are very few clues. There are no easy answers, and what we believe we’ve learned is perhaps only guesswork. Nevertheless, this is the first step to finding the answers.’
Kawakami reflexively began to yawn; he covered his mouth to stifle the impulse. ‘The essential fact is this, Dr. Jessup…we were meant to be here for a deliberate reason. We don’t know what it is, or what they expected to gain from our presence on Mars. At least, not yet…but the first layer of the mystery has been peeled away.’
He stared directly at Jessup. ‘Beyond the Labyrinth,’ he said, ‘is yet another labyrinth. At least, that is the way it now seems. The question is, will you let us continue?’
‘Will I…?’ Jessup began.
‘They’re waiting for us,’ Johnson said. ‘The door is wide open. But we’re not going to do a thing about it if the boys in Washington and Minsk continue to act like children. We’ve decided that we’re not going to allow the Cooties to become part of your little scuffle, and that’s what the strike is about.’
Jessup turned to glare at him. ‘Your work can be continued by another expedition.’
Johnson shrugged. ‘Maybe so, but how long will that take if we destroy our research? Two, three years. I have a gut feeling that the Cooties are not going to wait much longer.’
The NASA administrator was quiet for another moment. ‘Forget it, Art,’ he said at last. ‘It won’t work. The Shinseiki’s still in orbit, and we’ve still got men aboard. Play rough if you want, but we can stage another attack whenever we want…’
Cassidy had been silent throughout the conversation. Indeed, it suddenly occurred to him, he had been aloof for far too long. He cleared his throat and took a step forward, entering the circle for the first time. ‘He’s still lying, guys.’
Dick Jessup turned around and thrust a finger in his face. ‘You stay out of this!’ he snapped. ‘This is none of your goddamn business!’
Cassidy looked straight at Jessup as he continued. ‘There’s one military guy, a Marine colonel, still on the Shinseiki. So far as I know, there’s no more attack fighters left. They blew the whole wad when they took out the Bushmasters. Besides the command crew, all that’s left up there is one rear-echelon motherfucker. He can’t do a thing.’
The science team was watching Jessup again. The truth was finally coming out; his aces were all used up, his lies were finally exhausted. ‘Maybe,’ he said, his voice quavering. ‘He could be right, maybe. But what happens when the Lowell gets here in nine months? You think there’s not going to be another strike team on that ship?’
Johnson looked indifferent. ‘That’s always a possibility. So what? What’s to stop us from destroying the data when they show up? Doesn’t help them a bit. Even in the worst-case scenario, they’ve got a bunch of dead renegades and nothing to show for it. Everything’s lost for good…plus, they’ve got to answer to the world for a massacre.’ He smiled again. ‘Nobody wins. Somehow, I don’t think even George White could be that stupid.’
‘Face it, Dick,’ Cassidy said benignly. ‘It’s time to grow up. You can stop playing your game of beat-the-Russkies now.’
Jessup’s temper, held in check for so long, finally blew. ‘I thought I told you to shut up, you goddamn junkie!’ he shouted at Cassidy.
Cassidy stared back at Jessup. Behind Jessup, Johnson smiled softly and nodded his head. Without thinking twice, Cassidy balled up his fist and slugged Jessup with a fast, hard hook to the jaw.
The NASA administrator toppled backwards, fell over a chair, and crashed to the floor. ‘On second thought,’ Cassidy said, massaging his knuckles, ‘sometimes it’s satisfying to be immature.’
He turned and walked out of the module. Johnson looked down at Jessup, who was wiping blood from the corner of his mouth and beginning to rise from the floor. No one moved to help him get up. ‘I’ll take back command of this base now, if you don’t mind,’ Johnson said quietly. ‘The lander will be launching at thirteen-hundred hours. I trust that you and captain D’Agostino will be on it. This meeting is adjourned.’
Johnson left the compartment and took a deep breath, then walked down the corridor to the wardroom. The hatch was open. Cassidy was there, gazing out the narrow window at the red terrain. Beyond the window lay the City; looming in the foreground was the C-4 Pyramid, arched high against the noonday sky.
The astrophysicist softly padded into the wardroom, then stopped. Although Cassidy’s back was turned to him, he could hear the musician whispering something to himself. Johnson listened; no, not whispering. Singing…
‘Early this mornin’…when you knocked on my door…’
Cassidy stopped abruptly, as if he subliminally detected another presence in the module, yet he said nothing as he continued to stare out the window. Johnson cleared his throat slightly. ‘Ben Cassidy, two-fisted guitarist,’ he said, walking up behind the musician. ‘Nice hook you got there. How’s your hand?’
Cassidy shrugged, not turning around. ‘Bruised, but it should heal by the time I do my next gig. Probably in a federal prison.’
The station co-supervisor joined him at the window. ‘Naw, Dick won’t do anything like that. It’ll mean admitting that he was beaten up by a liberal. I just wouldn’t turn your back on him between now and the time you get to Earth.’
He followed Cassidy’s gaze out the window. ‘The lander to the Shinseiki takes off in about two hours. Think y
ou’re going to miss this place?’
‘Hell, no. I can’t wait to go home.’ Cassidy paused. ‘But I might miss the Cooties. They were good to jam with. Can you give me a tape of that performance?’
Johnson thought it over. ‘Sorry. Maybe in ten years, but not now. It’s too sensitive.’
‘S’okay. Sometimes the best concerts never get heard but once,’ Cassidy hesitated. ‘Do you really think this strike of yours is going to work?’
‘Maybe so, maybe not. But it’ll put all the jerks back there on notice that we’re not going to take it any more. Perhaps that’s all that really counts. Don’t worry about us.’
Cassidy snickered. ‘I won’t…well, maybe I will.’
‘How are you doing?’
Ben Cassidy gazed out at the barren landscape, looking away from the dead city. In the far distance on the horizon, the ruined profile of the Face stared up into space. Serenity in ancient stone. Serenity in his own mind. For the first time in years, the fear and the cravings were gone.
‘How am I doing?’ Cassidy closed his eyes and rested his chin on his arms.
After a while he smiled. ‘I feel a whole lot better,’ he said.
Interlude
‘SPYING, TO A GREATER EXTENT than at any time in the past century, will be pressed into service in support not only of government objectives but of corporate strategy as well, on the assumption that corporate power will necessarily contribute to national power. The entire armamentarium of electronic surveillance may be pressed into commercial service, along with armies of trained human operatives…’
Alvin Toffler
Powershift (1990)
Washington D.C.: November 12, 0900 EST, 2031
ANTI-SPACE DEMONSTRATORS had defaced a signboard on the Red Line platform of the Dupont Circle Metro station; August Nash noticed it as he stepped off the tram and into the crowd of morning commuters. The hologram, just above a bench now occupied by a couple of Georgetown University freshmen, displayed an ad for Newsweek. Pictured was a photo of the Face; the ad copy proclaimed the magazine to be ‘not just another pretty face’ or somesuch wordplay, but the misspelled message which had been spray-painted in a red swathe across the transparent frame was much more direct:
LEAVE MARS TO THE MARTAINS!!
U.S. OUT NOW!!
Nash studied it only for a moment before he rebuttoned his trenchcoat and strode down the platform toward the escalator to the street.
The headquarters of Security Associates Ltd was located on Connecticut Avenue one block from Dupont Circle, in a row of commercial buildings not far from Embassy Row. There was nothing to distinguish the entrance to one of the world’s foremost private intelligence agencies from anything else on the street; on the right was a bagel shop, on the left was a gay/lesbian bookstore, and in the middle was a single frosted-glass door with the firm’s name etched on the glass, so innocuous and low-profile that it could have belonged to a detective agency that specialized in skip-tracing and divorce cases.
Nash pushed open the door, walked down the narrow corridor to the foyer and stopped in front of the two elevators to remove his trenchcoat; he made sure that his face was in plain view at all times, to allow for the eyes at the other end of the hidden TV cameras to recognize him. The elevator on the right had a panel with a recessed up-button; the elevator on the left had a keycard slot. Nash pulled his keycard out of the inside pocket of his double-breasted suitcoat and slid it into the slot.
‘Nash, August,’ he said. He thought for a second, then recited: ‘“The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things.”’
This was enough for the computer’s voice-recognition system to confirm his identity. His name was important but the Lewis Carroll quote was unessential; he could have read the list of ingredients from the back of a cereal box and it would have satisfied the AI. The left elevator door opened, just as it would have had he not spoken aloud, but without voice-print identification he would have been gassed through concealed vents in the elevator’s ceiling as soon as he entered the car.
If he had been an unsolicited client or a curious pedestrian and had boarded the elevator on the right, it would have taken him to the second floor, where a polite receptionist would have given him an application form, a rather uninformative brochure, and a mild lecture to the effect that Security Associates Ltd was a very specialized agency which catered to the very particular needs of a very exclusive sort of client. He might have heard the buzz of printers and the beep of telephones behind the partition in back of her desk—both of which were taped sound-effects—but he would never have seen the TEC-9 assault pistol hidden in the half-open drawer just above her lap.
Inside the left elevator, though, there was no floor button panel. There was no need for it, since it took Nash straight to the third floor. There was a reception area here as well, but much different from the one on the floor below: no incidental furniture, potted ferns or helpful lady at a desk. In the dimly-lit foyer a taciturn young black man sitting behind a bullet-proof window silently watched Nash as he walked to the ID station next to the elevator and subjected himself to handprint and retina analysis.
The sentry glanced at the screens below the counter, then passed a plastic badge to him through a slot in the window. ‘Welcome back, Mr Nash,’ he said. His voice had the quasi-British accent of a native West African; he was seated in a wheelchair. ‘He’s waiting for you in the conference room.’
‘Thanks, Bart. It’s nice to be home.’ Nash clipped the badge to his jacket lapel—its plastic coating still warm to the touch, the enclosed photo taken from the image of himself which had been captured on the ground-floor TV monitor—and walked to the heavy oak door to the right of the security checkpoint. Bart buzzed open the lock as Nash placed his hand on the stainless-steel knob; had he not cleared Nash through, a 50,000-volt charge through the knob would have knocked Nash across the foyer.
Beyond the door was Security Associates’ inner sanctum. This was the next-most sensitive part of SA’s headquarters. Beneath the building, in an underground level accessible only by a third elevator, was the Pit, the main operations center where a dozen men and women monitored every discreet move made by the agency’s operatives as transmitted to them by satellite. The big Cray-10 computer was down there, too, as well as the armory and the firing range, but this was not where Nash was headed. At least not today; Control had called for a meeting with him on the third floor, and it would not be until much later that Nash would have anything to do with the Pit.
The corridor led Nash past a long row of soundproof doors, each guarded by its own keycard slot and numberpad. Anonymous young men and women—secretaries, data analysts, information specialists and so forth—passed him in the hallway, smiling politely but glancing down at the desert-tan carpet to avoid looking at him. Security Associates was not like other companies; there were no office parties at Christmas time or get-well cards for people who went to the hospital. Most employees’ paychecks were drawn on the bank accounts of the adjacent bagel shop or gay-lesbian bookstore, since they themselves were fronts for the agency. Casual fraternization among employees was discouraged, if not grounds for outright dismissal. As a field operative, Nash had many allies here, but no friends; besides Bart at the front desk, he hardly knew anyone at the Washington office by name.
Aside from Control, of course, and he discouraged the use of his name except in private by his senior operatives. Nash reached the conference room at the end of the corridor, knocked once on the door out of habit, and twisted the doorknob.
Before he had opened the door even an inch, he heard Control’s voice from within: ‘Good afternoon, Mr Nash. Please come in. We’ve got quite a bit to discuss, you and I…’
A dry chuckle. ‘“Of shoes and ships and sealing wax…”’
Of course he would have been monitoring his arrival; there was very little which Control missed. ‘“Of cabbages and kings,”’ Nash finished as he walked into the windowless lair—where the s
ea often boiled and, at times, it seemed as if pigs could take wing.
Control looked like an Oxford history professor who had taken an extended sabbatical and gone slumming in the States. His baggy trousers and Irish wool fisherman’s sweater were filthy with ashes from his briar pipe, and he studied Nash through his wire-rim glasses with eyes only a darker shade of grey than his longish hair and unkempt mustache. When he stood up from behind the long conference table to shake the agent’s hand, he automatically reached for the silver-headed cane propped next to the table.
The cane was more of an affectation than something necessary to relieve the weight on his damaged right knee, which he claimed was broken during a polo match at Eton during his youth. The fact of the matter was that Robert Halprin had never been to Oxford; his old college tie was from a much rougher place, somewhere in Beirut where he had been held hostage by Shiite Muslim extremists for nearly two years in the 1990s before he had managed to make his escape. It was rumored that, although he had indeed been a schoolboy at Eton, he had never seen the inside of a stable, let alone mounted a saddle for a polo match. The old knee injury was the result of a mission so sensitive that, even to this day, he was forbidden to discuss it because of the Official Secrets Act.
Halprin was a veteran of MI-6, which was hardly surprising. There were at least half a dozen alumni of His Majesty’s Secret Service on the payroll at Security Associates, along with various former members of Mossad, the Russian Central Intelligence Service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, La Piscine and (like Nash himself) the US Central Intelligence Agency. As a private intelligence agency, Security Associates Limited prided itself on its ability to hire former employees of various government spy apparatus; it was better than having to hire inexperienced amateurs and then train them in spycraft. Since the British, the Israelis, the Russians, the Canadians, the French and the Americans were all fully aware of SA’s line of work, they rarely made objections to their alumni going to work for one of the ‘privates’ (although, in certain circles of the intelligence community, SA was alleged to stand for Sold-out Assholes). After all, it was far more desirable to have a retired agent lend his services to a firm in the private sector, where at least one could keep track of his whereabouts, than have him go to work for one of Them or to write another embarrassing memoir.