“Thank you, Comrade.”
Voroshilov lifted his videoglasses with a practiced gesture, favoring her with a long stare from velvety blue pop-star eyes. “You’re a Marxist?”
“Economic democrat,” Laura said. Voroshilov rolled his eyes in brief involuntary derision and set the glasses back onto his nose. “Have you heard from the F.A.C.T. before today?”
“Never,” Laura said. “Never heard of them.”
“The statement makes no mention of the groups from Europe and Singapore.”
“I don’t think they knew the others were here,” Laura said. “We—Rizome, I mean—we were very careful on security. Ms. Emerson, our security person, can tell you more about that.”
Voroshilov smiled. “The American notion of ‘careful security.’ I’m touched.” He paused. “Why are you involved in this? It’s not your business.”
“It is now,” Laura said. “Who is this F.A.C.T.? Can you help us against them?”
“They don’t exist,” Voroshilov said. “Oh, they did once. Years ago. All those millions your American government spent, little groups here, little groups there. Ugly little spinoffs from the Old Cold Days. But F.A.C.T. is just a front now, a fairy story. F.A.C.T. is a mask the data havens hide behind to shoot at each other.” He made a pistol-pointing gesture. “Like the old Red Brigades, pop-pop-pop against NATO. Angolan UNITA, pop-pop-pop against the Cubans.” He smiled. “So here we are, yes, we sit in these nice chairs, we drink this nice tea like civilized people. Because you stepped into the rubbish left over because your grandfather didn’t like mine.”
“What do you plan to do?”
“I ought to scold you,” Voroshilov said. “But I’m going to scold your ex-CIA commissar upstairs. And my Ranger friend will scold too. My Ranger friend doesn’t care for the nasty mess you make of the nice reputation of Texas.” He flipped up the screen of his terminal and keyed in commands. “You saw the flying drone that did the shooting.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me if you see it here.”
Images flashed by, four-second bursts of nicely shaded computer graphics. Stubby-winged aircraft with blind fuselages—no cockpit, they were radio controlled. Some were spattered in camouflage. Others showed ID numbers in stenciled Cyrillic or Hebrew. “No, not like that,” Laura said.
Voroshilov shrugged and touched the keys. Odder-looking craft appeared: two little blimps. Then a skeletal thing, like a collision between a helicopter and a child’s tricycle. Then a kind of double-rotored golfball. Then an orange peanut. “Hold it,” Laura said.
Voroshilov froze the image. “That’s it,” Laura said. “That landing gear—like a barbecue pit.” She stared at it. The narrow waist of the peanut had two broad counterrotating helicopter blades. “When the blades move, they catch the light, and it looks like a saucer,” she said aloud. “A flying saucer with big bumps on the top and the bottom.”
Voroshilov examined the screen. “You saw a Canadair CL-227 VTOL RPV. Vertical Take-Off and Landing, Remotely Piloted Vehicle. It has a range of thirty miles—miles, what a silly measurement.…” He typed a note on his Cyrillic keyboard. “It was probably launched somewhere on this island by the assassins … or perhaps from a ship. Easy to launch, this thing. No runway.”
“The one I saw was a different color. Bare metal, I think.”
“And equipped with a machine gun,” Voroshilov said. “Not standard issue. But an old craft like this has been on the black arms markets for many, many years. Cheap to buy if you have the contacts.”
“Then you can’t trace the owners?”
He looked at her pityingly.
Voroshilov’s watchphone beeped. It was the Ranger. “I’m out here on the walkway,” she said. “I have one of the slugs.”
“Let me guess,” Voroshilov said. “Standard NATO 35 millimeter.”
“Affirmative, yes.”
“Think of those millions and millions of unfired NATO bullets,” mused Voroshilov. “Too many even for the African market, eh? An unfired bullet has a kind of evil pressure in it, don’t you think? Something in it wants to be fired.…” He paused, his blank lenses fixed on Laura. “You’re not following me.”
“Sorry, I thought you were talking to her.” Laura paused. “Can’t you do anything?”
“The situation seems clear,” he said. “An ‘inside job,’ as they say. One of the pirate groups had collaborators on this island. Probably the Singapore Islamic Bank, famous for treachery. They had the chance to kill Stubbs and took it.” He shut down the screen. “During my flight into Galveston, I accessed the file in Grenada, on Stubbs, that was mentioned in the FACT communiqué. Very interesting to read. The killers exploited the nature of data-haven banking—that the coded files are totally secure, even against the haven pirates themselves. Only a haven would turn a haven’s strength against itself in this humiliating way.”
“You must be able to help us, though.”
Voroshilov shrugged. “The local police can carry out certain actions. Tracing the local ships, for instance—see if any were close offshore, and who hired them. But I am glad to say that this was not an act of politically motivated terrorism. I would classify this as a gangster killing. The FACT communiqué is only an attempt to muddy the waters. A Vienna Convention case has certain publicity restrictions that they find useful.”
“But a man was killed here!”
“It was a murder, yes. But not a threat to the political order of the Vienna Convention signatories.”
Laura was shocked. “Then what good are you?”
Voroshilov looked hurt. “Oh, we are very much good at easing international tension. But we are not a global police force.” He emptied his teacup and set it aside. “Oh, Moscow has been pressing for a true global police force for many years now. But Washington stands in the way. Always trifling about Big Brother, civil liberties, privacy laws. It’s an old story.”
“You can’t help us at all.”
Voroshilov stood up. “Ms. Webster, you invited these gangsters into your home, I didn’t. If you had called us first we would have urged you against it in the strongest possible terms.” He hefted his terminal. “I need to interview your husband next. Thank you for the tea.”
Laura left him and went upstairs to the telecom office. Emerson and the mayor were sitting together on one of the rattan couches, with the satisfied look of people who had beaten a debate into submission. Magruder was forking his way through a belated Tex-Mex breakfast of migas and refried beans.
Laura sat down in a chair across the table and leaned forward, vibrating with anger. “Well, you two look comfortable.”
“You’ve been talking to the Vienna representative,” Emerson said.
“He’s no goddamn use at all.”
“KGB,” Emerson sniffed.
“He says it’s not political, not their jurisdiction.”
Emerson looked surprised. “Hmmph. That’s a first for them.”
Laura stared at her. “Well, what do we do about it?”
Magruder set down a glass of milk. “We’re shutting you down, Laura.”
“Just for a while,” Emerson added.
Laura’s jaw dropped. “Shutting down my Lodge? Why? Why?”
“It’s all worked out,” Magruder said. “See, if it’s criminal, then the media get to swarm all over us. They’d play it up big, and it’d be worse for tourism than a shark scare. But if we shut you down, then it looks like spook business. Classified. And nobody looks too deep when Vienna comes calling.” He shrugged. “I mean, they’ll figure it eventually, but by then it’d be old news. And the damage is limited.” He stood up. “I need to talk to that Ranger. You know. Assure her that the city of Galveston will cooperate in every way possible.” He picked up his briefcase and lumbered down the stairs.
Laura glared at Emerson. “So that’s it? You shut down the scandal, and David and I pay the price?”
Emerson smiled gently. “Don’t be impatient, dear. Our project isn’t over
because of this one attack. Don’t forget—it’s because of attacks like this that the pirates agreed to meet in the first place.”
Laura was surprised. She sat down. Hope appeared amidst her confusion. “So you’re still pursuing that? Despite all this?”
“Of course, Laura. The problem has scarcely gone away, has it? No, it’s closer to us than ever before. We’re lucky we didn’t lose you—you, a very valued associate.”
Laura looked up, surprised. Debra Emerson’s face was set quite calmly—the face of a woman simply relaying the truth. Not flattery—a fact. Laura sat up straighter. “Well, it was an attack on Rizome, wasn’t it? A direct attack on our company.”
“Yes. They found a weakness in us—the F.A.C.T. did, or the people behind that alias.” Emerson looked grave. “There must have been a security leak. That deadly aircraft—I suspect it’s been waiting in ambush for days. Someone knew of the meeting and was watching this place.”
“A security leak within Rizome?”
“We mustn’t jump to conclusions. But we will have to find out the truth. It’s more important than this Lodge, Laura. Much more important.” She paused. “We can come to terms with the Vienna investigators. We can come to terms with the city of Galveston. But that’s not the hardest part. We promised safety to the people at this conference, and we failed. Now we need someone to smooth the waters. In Grenada.”
Rizome’s Chattahoochee Retreat was in the foothills of the Smokies, about sixty miles northeast of Atlanta. Eight hundred acres of wooded hills in a valley with a white stony creek that was dry this year. Chattahoochee was a favorite of the Central Committee; it was close enough to the city for convenience, and boondocky enough for people to stay out of the Committee’s collective face.
New recruits were often brought here—in fact this was where Emily had first introduced her to David Webster. Back in the old stone farmhouse, the one without the geodesics. Laura couldn’t look at these Chattahoochee hills without remembering that night: David, a stranger, tall and thin and elegant in midnight blue, with a drink in his hand and black hair streaming down his back.
In fact everybody in that party, all the sharper recruits anyway, had gone out of their way to dress in penthouse elegance. To go against the grain a bit, to show they weren’t going to be socialized all that easily, thank you. But here they were, years later, out in the Georgia woods with the Central Committee, not new recruits but full-fledged associates, playing for keeps.
Of course the Committee personnel were all different now, but certain traditions persisted.
You could tell the importance of this meeting by the elaborate informality of their dress. Normal problems they would have run through in Atlanta, standard boardroom stuff, but this Grenada situation was a genuine crisis. Therefore, the whole Committee were wearing their Back-slapping Hick look, a kind of Honest Abe the Rail-Splitter image. Frayed denim jeans, flannel work shirts rolled up to the elbow.… Garcia-Meza, a hefty Mexican industrialist who looked like he could bite tenpenny nails in half, was carrying a big straw picnic basket.
It was funny to think of Charlie Cullen being CEO. Laura hadn’t met Cullen face to face since his appointment, though she’d networked with him a little when they were building the Lodge. Cullen was a biochemist, in construction plastics mostly, a nice enough guy. He was a great caretaker Rizome CEO, because you trusted him instinctively—but he didn’t much come across as an alley fighter. Since his appointment he’d taken to wearing a gray fedora perched on the back of his head. Less like a hat than a halo or crown. It was funny how authority affected people.
Cullen’s whole face had changed. With his square chin and broad nose, and mouth gone a little severe, he was starting to look like a black George Washington. The original, primeval George Washington, not the recent black president by the same name.
Then there were the others. Sharon McIntyre, Emily Donato’s mentor on the Committee, and Emily herself, her ringleted hair caught under a scarf so that she looked like she’d just been cleaning a stove. Kaufmann, the realpolitik European, managing to look refined and natty even in jeans and knapsack. De Valera, self-styled firebrand of the Committee, who tended to grandstand, but was always coming up with the bright idea. The professorial Gauss, and the cozy-conciliatory Raduga. And bringing up the rear of the group, the ancient Mr. Saito. Saito was wearing a kind of Ben Franklin fur hat and bifocals, but he leaned on a tall knotted staff, like some hybridized Taoist hermit.
Then there were herself, and David, and Debra Emerson. Not Committee members, but witnesses.
Cullen crunched to a stop in a leaf-strewn autumn glade. They were meeting far from wires for security reasons. They’d even left their watchphones behind, in one of the farmhouses.
McIntyre and Raduga spread a large checkered picnic cloth. Everyone shuffled into a circle and sat. They joined hands and sang a Rizome anthem. Then they ate.
It was fascinating to watch. The Committee really worked at it, that sense of community. They’d made a practice of living together for weeks on end. Doing each other’s laundry, tending each other’s kids. It was policy. They were elected, but once in power they were given wide authority and expected to get on with it. For Rizome, getting on with it meant a more or less open, small-scale conspiracy.
Of course the fashion for gemeineschaft intensity came and went. Years ago, during Saito’s period as CEO, there had been a legendary time when he’d taken the whole Committee to Hokkaido. When they rose before dawn to bathe naked in freezing waterfalls. And ate brown rice and, if rumor were true, had killed, butchered, and eaten a deer while living for three days in a cave. No one on the Committee had ever talked much about the experience afterward, but there was no denying that they’d become one hell of a group.
Of course that was the sort of bullshit half-legendry that clumped around any center of corporate power, but the Committee fed the mystique. And Rizome instinctively fell back on gut-level solidarity in times of trouble.
It was far from perfect. You could see it by the way they were acting—the way, for instance, that de Valera and Kaufmann made an unnecessarily big deal over who was going to cut and serve the bread. But you could see that it worked, too. Rizome association was a lot more than a job. It was tribal. You could live and die for it.
It was a simple meal. Apples, bread, cheese, some “ham spread” that was obviously tailored scop. And mineral water. Then they got to business—not calling anybody to order, but drifting into it, bit by bit.
They started with the F.A.C.T. They were more afraid of them than of Grenada. The Grenadians were thieving pirates, but at least they’d stayed in deep background, whereas the F.A.C.T., whoever they were, had seriously embarrassed the company. Thanks to that, they had Vienna to worry about now, though Vienna was vacillating. Even more than usual.
Rizome was determined to track down the F.A.C.T. They didn’t expect that it would be simple or easy, but Rizome was a major multinational with thousands of associates and outposts on five continents. They had contacts throughout the Net and a tradition of patience. Sooner or later they would get at the truth. No matter who was hiding it.
The immediate target of suspicion was Singapore, either the Islamic Bank or the Singapore Government, though the lines between the two were blurry. No one doubted Singapore was capable of carrying out the killing in Galveston. Singapore had never signed the Vienna Convention, and they boasted openly of the reach of their military and intelligence services.
It was hard to understand, though, why they would pick a fight with Grenada, after agreeing to negotiate. Especially a rash provocation like the Stubbs killing, guaranteed to enrage Grenada without doing real strategic damage. Singapore was arrogant, and technologically reckless, but no one had ever said they were stupid.
So the Committee agreed to suspend judgment while awaiting further evidence. There were too many possibilities at present, and to try to cover every contingency would only bring paralysis. In the meantime they would move with th
e initiative, ignoring the terrorist communiqué.
FACT was obviously a threat, assuming FACT had a separate existence from the people they were already dealing with. But they’d had a clear chance to kill a Rizome associate—Laura—and had chosen not to take it. That was some small comfort.
The discussion moved to the Grenada situation.
“I don’t see what we can do on the ground in Grenada that we can’t manage over the Net,” Raduga said.
“It’s time we stopped making that false distinction!” de Valera said. “With our newest online stuff—the tech Vienna uses—we are the Net. I mean—in MacLuhanesque terms—a Rizome associate in videoshades can be a cognitive spearhead for the entire company.…”
“We’re not Vienna,” Kaufmann said. “It does not mean it will work for us.”
“We’re in a one-down situation with Grenada now,” said Cullen. “We’re not in a position to talk media invasion.”
“Yes, Charlie,” de Valera said, “but don’t you see, that’s exactly why it will work. We go in apologizing, but we come out indoctrinating.”
Cullen frowned. “We’re responsible for the death of one of their top people. This Winston Stubbs. It’s as if one of us had been killed. Like we’d lost Mr. Saito.”
Simple words, but Laura could see it hit them. Cullen had a knack for pulling things down to human scale. They were wincing.
“That is why I should go to Grenada,” Saito said. He never said much. He didn’t need to.
“I don’t like it,” said Garcia-Meza. “Why make this an eye-for-eye situation? It’s not our fault that the pirates have enemies. We didn’t shoot them. And we are not one down, because they were never up on our level.” Garcia-Meza was the hard-liner of the group. “I think this diplomatic approach was a mistake. You don’t stop thieves by kissing them.” He paused. “But I agree that we can’t back out now. Our credibility’s at stake.”
“We can’t allow this to degenerate into a gangster power struggle,” Gauss declared. “We have to restore the trust that we went to such pains to establish. So we must convince Grenada of three things: that it was not our doing, that we are still trustworthy, and that they can gain from cooperation with us. Not from confrontation.”
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