The Spartacus File

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “I don't know-that's one thing I want you to find out for me.”

  “You don't think they'll kill me?”

  Casper shook his head. “Not until they've got me,” he said. “You'll be their best link, and they'll know it. You just tell them that you were kidnapped, make whatever connections you need to keep yourself safe-that's another reason I want to stall, to give you time.” He pressed the bill toward her.

  Reluctantly, she took it.

  Casper smiled at her.

  He knew why she was reluctant-he was doing exactly what she had wanted him to do all along, but he wasn't whining about it, wasn't putting up a struggle, and she didn't trust that. She thought there had to be a catch.

  She was right, of course-there was a catch.

  That was the next step in his plan.

  The fact that his identity was known right from the first, and that he was too heavily outgunned to set up a guerrilla force in the wilderness somewhere, had made most of the preferred options in the Spartacus File impossible-Schiano hadn't compiled it with the U.S. in mind. Casper's promise to Mirim not to openly take power himself limited his choices still further. The government's disavowal of any ill intentions toward him narrowed it down even more.

  He couldn't stay underground without ruining his position, and if he tried to operate in the open he could never succeed-they'd find a way to kill him if he started to get close. He had to find a third way.

  And of course, the Spartacus File provided one. Schiano and the hundred other programmers who had worked on the File hadn't been able to think of every possible contingency, but they'd included every general case they could think of, and provided guidelines for choosing which model to follow.

  It was pretty clear what to do in this situation. When presented with two unacceptable options, find a third choice even if it looks even worse on the surface. And here there was definitely such a choice, one that looked really bad at first:

  Martyrdom.

  Not suicide, of course-he had no intention of killing himself, and if he let himself be killed, who would lead the revolution? Who would guide People For Change into power? And he didn't want to die.

  Spartacus had died for his revolt, and the revolt had died with him. Casper didn't want that, didn't want either part of it-he wanted to live, and he wanted his revolution to continue and grow. Martyrdom was a matter of public perception, not reality; all he had to do was appear to die, at the hands of a treacherous government.

  He was pretty sure he could pull it off.

  He hadn't yet worked out the details, though, and until he did, he wasn't about to let Cecelia in on his plans.

  “Go on,” he told Cecelia, “go turn yourself in, or whatever.”

  She stared at him a moment longer, then nodded.

  “Okay,” she said. “I'll turn myself in to… let's see… CNN, I guess. Or maybe ABC would be better.”

  He smiled wryly. “Not the cops?”

  “Don't be an idiot, Casper. Hasn't that thing in your head taught you anything? They aren't going to shoot me live on TV; in private, though, who knows?”

  Casper nodded. She was exactly right.

  He wondered-if Cecelia had gone for one of Covert's optimizations, would she have gotten the Spartacus File? She seemed to have half the tactical knowledge already. Certainly, she had more of what it took to fight a revolution than he had had before his visit to NeuroTalents.

  “Colby,” Cecelia called up the stairs, “could Rose or Tasha or someone drop me somewhere? And I need to make a shielded phone call.” She turned and headed back for the kitchen.

  Casper watched her go, then settled onto the couch beside Mirim.

  The news was still running, but had moved on to the financial report. Casper watched it, not really paying attention.

  Mirim stared at him.

  “Are you really giving up, Cas?” she asked at last.

  He looked at her, startled, then smiled at her, a big, warm smile.

  “Nope,” he said. “Come on, let's get the vidcam; as soon as Celia's gone I want to record some more speeches. And I need to check the nets, see if we've got some volunteers. After that we'll talk to Colby and the others about setting up maildrops and bank accounts for contributions.”

  “So you're still going to try this political stuff?”

  “Absolutely!” He stood up and reached down for her hand. “Come on,” he said. “We've got a campaign to launch.”

  Bob Schiano stared at the screen in amazement. A dozen security men were shielding Cecelia Grand from the mob as she was led up the courthouse steps.

  “Ms. Grand, a lawyer representing alleged terrorist Casper Beech, announced that she had come to negotiate Beech's surrender,” the off-screen reporter announced.

  “But he can't,” Schiano said. “He can't surrender. The file won't let him.” He smacked a fist onto the table in front of him. “ I won't let him!”

  The scene cut to Cecelia addressing the press.

  “Mr. Beech is understandably wary,” she said. “Government agents openly tried to kill him on the streets of Philadelphia and again in New York, and while the administration may now say that those agents were acting without authorization, Mr. Beech feels that he needs greater assurance of his own safety before turning himself in.”

  Schiano leaned back in his chair, staring at the screen.

  Beech couldn't surrender. And especially not now, when he'd scored a victory and forced the government to disavow their attacks on him! Smith and his chief aide and two triggermen were packed away somewhere, being prepared as scapegoats; Schiano had been briefly concerned that they might even sacrifice him, but in the end they hadn't done anything that desperate. Good imprint programmers were hard to find.

  He was, however, out of work for the moment, while they looked for somewhere else to put him. That meant he could stay home and watch the news.

  He hadn't expected this, though.

  Was the Spartacus File breaking down?

  Or… He relaxed somewhat as the thought struck him.

  Or was Beech up to something?

  That had to be it. Beech wasn't going to surrender at all.

  Schiano tried to remember more of what had gone into the File. He'd overseen the whole thing, but of course it had been far too much for one person to do single-handed; if he'd been able to write the whole Spartacus File by himself, he'd have been the new Spartacus.

  Then he had it. He knew what was coming.

  He wondered how Beech would set it up.

  “I'm here representing Casper Beech and People For Change,” Cecelia told the interviewer.

  “And are you a member of People For Change, yourself?” he asked her.

  “People For Change is a legitimate political organization, seeking recognition…” she began.

  “Yes, Ms. Grand,” the interviewer interrupted, “but are you a member of People For Change?”

  For a moment, Cecelia hesitated. On a living room couch somewhere in New Jersey, Casper Beech looked up from his laptop and waited.

  Cecelia had surfaced two days before, with much fanfare. The government had apologized to her, the media had feted her, and everyone had listened to her tale of desperate flight from crazed renegade feds. There had been various denunciations of the “rogue” operation, and several editorial comments about the need for a political reform movement like People For Change.

  But until now, no one had asked her much about her own politics.

  No one-not even Casper.

  And Casper needed to know. He had plans for Cecelia and for PFC.

  “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, I am.”

  Casper thrust a fist in the air and said, “Yes!”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Tell them I want to surrender at the U.N., in front of the international community,” Casper said into the phone.

  “Do you?” Cecelia asked.

  Casper smiled. “It's a possibility,” he said.

  “The U.N. s
hould be okay,” Cecelia said thoughtfully.

  “See how it would work, then, and I'll get back to you. I should have that speech ready for you soon, too.” He shut off the phone and stuck it in his pocket.

  “I thought…” Mirim said.

  “What?” He looked up at her, startled.

  “Didn't you just ask Rose to book you on the train to Kennedy Spaceport? I thought maybe you were heading out to somewhere on the Fringe.”

  “Where I might get a more sympathetic hearing?” Casper shook his head. “It wouldn't be the Fringers themselves who'd be listening to me out there, it would be the authorities, and they're heavily into suppressing rebellion.”

  “But then why did… isn't that what you told Rose?”

  “Don't worry about what I told Rose,” Casper said. “You just be ready to go.”

  “Casper, I don't want to go out to the Fringe! Space travel scares me.”

  He looked up at her with interest. “Have you ever done any space traveling?”

  “No, and I'm not going to!”

  He held up his hands. “Okay, okay, that's no problem! You don't have to. I promise.”

  “You're going without me?”

  “Look, Mirim, just trust me, okay? It'll all be fine, just wait and see.”

  She looked down at him uncertainly.

  “I promise,” he said.

  She turned away.

  He watched her go, then picked up his laptop and booted it up. He had things to do. There were a lot of arrangements to make.

  It was a good thing that PFC had at least one or two serious terrorists as members; he was going to need some of Ed's skills, and other specialists, as well. He'd need a bomb, and for some reason he hadn't been getting much help from the Spartacus File with the specifications on that. Maybe part of the imprint hadn't taken properly, or maybe one of Schiano's programmers had been faking it.

  He'd need some specialized equipment-equipment Ed probably couldn't provide, but he might know someone who could. Fortunately, the equipment didn't actually need to work.

  And he wanted some way to remove a person without anyone knowing it; poison, perhaps, or an engineered bug of some sort…?

  “Sir,” the aide said.

  The Chief of Staff looked up. “Yes?”

  “It's about Casper Beech,” he said.

  “What about him?”

  “It seems we have conflicting reports about him, sir. That lawyer of his says Beech is going to turn himself in at the U.N., but the word on the net is that he intends to head out to the Fringe.”

  The Chief of Staff sat up straight and looked the aide in the eye.

  “The Fringe?”

  “Yes, sir. Probably to the L5 colony.”

  “And once he gets there, is he planning to surrender, or to join the rebels?” He had talked with Smith and Schiano; he remembered that Beech was supposed to join a rebel group. They'd assumed that PFC was that group, but maybe Beech had decided it was time to try starting over somewhere else.

  “We don't know, sir.” The aide hesitated. “He says he plans to surrender, but the people who worked on the Spartacus File say that he can't. And if you like… well, before we took over the situation, Covert had issued orders to destroy any ship Beech boarded, rather than risk letting him loose off-planet. We haven't actually countermanded those orders yet, and we can blame that on a bureaucratic foul-up if we have to.”

  “Countermand them,” the chief said immediately. “We want him alive, if at all possible. If he gets off-planet… hell, it ought to be that much easier to spot him and corner him out there. Everything's so much smaller. And if he does get killed, we can blame it on the radicals, we don't have to take the heat ourselves.” He gazed thoughtfully at the wall. “I wonder… do you suppose he'll surrender out there? Maybe he thinks the radicals will back him up, or that we won't dare harm him for fear of open revolt.”

  “The programmers say he can't surrender, sir.”

  The chief nodded.

  “If he's off-planet, he's less of a threat to us, alive or dead-we can always destroy the whole damn colony and blame the radicals.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You sure about this, Casper?” Ed asked again, holding up his ticket and freight receipt.

  “Absolutely,” Casper replied. “We've got to hurt them, force them to negotiate.”

  Ed nodded. “Damn straight. I've gotta give you credit, man-I didn't think you had the balls for something like this. You talk a good line sometimes, but I wasn't sure you had what it takes to be a real revolutionary, any more than the rest of these wusses. For four years they haven't dared do squat, and then you show up with this super-imprint in your head, and I think we'll finally get somewhere, then you start talking about peaceful change. If you'd stuck with that public surrender crap, I might've been tempted to put a knife in your back myself-the only thing the fat cats understand is violence, and that might have stirred some up. It's good to see you understand that you can't make an omelet without cracking some eggs.”

  Casper looked at Ed, the man who had deliberately waited until a cop was leaning over the planted bomb in the New York precinct before detonating it four years before, the man behind virtually every act of violence PFC had committed before Colby had taken charge and moved the group away from overt terrorism.

  Ed was a loose cannon, someone who couldn't be rehabilitated because he didn't want to be rehabilitated, someone who would always be in the way of any attempt to turn PFC into an effective political force.

  Casper clapped him on the back. “Whatever it costs, Ed. I know that now, same as you do.”

  Ed winced; the slap had stung. But then, everyone at PFC knew that Casper had a tendency to misjudge his own strength. “I thought you were serious about all that ‘peaceful means’ and ‘win at the ballot box’ crap,” he said.

  Casper just smiled. He twisted a ring on his finger; Ed noticed that. Casper was definitely changing, Ed thought; he hadn't worn any jewelry before, so far as Ed could remember.

  “You can't go that way, man,” Ed said. “You have to compromise too much if you play by their rules. You can't play politics that way and keep your ideals.”

  “I know,” Casper said. “Listen, good luck, Ed-and thanks for doing this.”

  “You, too,” Ed said. Then he turned and boarded the Florida train.

  Casper watched him go.

  He felt a surge of guilt over what he had just done-over both parts of it. He knew that before his optimization he would never have done such a thing, never even have considered it.

  Now he couldn't help it.

  At least, he told himself, this should be the last of it, the end of the violence. He would never do it again.

  And it was better than the guerrilla war that the Spartacus File kept urging him to lead.

  Cecelia Grand looked at her watch. She frowned. She'd heard the rumors about a flight to the Fringe, and intended to give Casper a piece of her mind. The U.N. would be much better for a surrender, and he damn well better intend to surrender! If he couldn't control that damned software in his head…?

  Well, he had plenty of good ideas, and she liked the whole idea of getting into politics, but she wasn't going to let some damn piece of spy fiction run her life.

  Her phone beeped; she snatched it up and opened it.

  “Grand,” she said.

  “Celia?”

  It was Mirim's voice, not Casper's.

  “Yes? Where's Casper?”

  “He told me to apologize, said he couldn't help it.”

  “Couldn't help what?”

  “He's heading for the Fringe.”

  Word went out on the net before Freight 2105 was even off the ground-Casper Beech was aboard, tucked in a crate in the cargo hold with his own oxygen, water, and food supplies. The passenger flights were too closely watched, and he'd wanted to get to the Fringe, so he'd had himself smuggled aboard an unmanned supply ship.

  All along Florida's northern Atlanti
c coast, people looked out their windows at the line of flame that was Freight 2105's launch from Kennedy and ascent toward space.

  Most of them, thanks to the rumors on the net, knew that Casper Beech, already something of a folk hero, was supposed to be aboard.

  And hundreds of eyes saw the sudden flash and knew instantly what it meant.

  “The guy gave his name as Thomas Paine,” the security guard read from the screen. “It's apparently phony-we aren't getting a description match on any real Thomas Paine, so it set off the security check, a bit late. He's already left the port. Whoever he really is, we think he might be connected with People For Change.”

  The spaceport's traffic manager asked, “People For Change-isn't that the group Casper Beech runs?”

  “Sure is,” the guard agreed. “Rumors on the net say Beech is being smuggled off-planet, and this guy checked some freight aboard 2105-a goddamn big crate, according to the shipping people. Big enough to hold a man and three days’ supplies. We thought you might want to hold the launch until we've searched it.”

  “You're a little late,” she said. “2105 took off for the L5 colony five minutes ago.”

  That was when the alarms went off. The flash hadn't been visible in the windowless office, but there were plenty of other reports of the explosion aboard Freight 2105.

  “Goddamn it,” the White House Chief of Staff said, “I thought I told you to countermand those orders.”

  “I did,” his aide said. “Someone must have gotten the word late.”

  “Shit. This'll mean another show trial; it makes us look really bad.” He sighed. “Well, at least Beech is out of the way.”

  Cecelia appeared before the cameras with tears on her cheeks, her make-up smeared.

  “Casper Beech was aboard that ship,” she said, “and the Covert Operations Group, a branch of the government of the United States, shot it down to make sure that he was not able to bring his message to the people of America. I demand that those responsible be brought to trial for murder!”

  The White House spokesman was visibly ruffled, though nowhere near as distraught as Cecelia, when he said, “This was an unfortunate accident. The orders to destroy any ship Casper Beech boarded had been countermanded, but apparently word had not reached everyone. We're still trying to locate whoever was responsible.”