by Ginger Booth
“Colonel MacLaren!” a middle aged businessman greeted him. He swallowed nervously. “I’m Alex Wiehl. We spoke on the phone. Some porters to handle your luggage. Party of thirty, I understood?”
“Thirty-two at present,” Emmett replied, pointing to the prisoners. He narrowed his eyes. “Councilman Wiehl? You are Major Beaufort’s second in command?”
“Oh, no!” replied Wiehl. “I run the hotel?”
“I see. And where is Major Beaufort’s second in command?”
“I don’t know who that is,” admitted Wiehl.
“But you’re on the Pittsburgh city council?” Emmett pressed.
“Yes… We don’t meet very often,” said Wiehl.
Emmett was clearly growing exasperated with this game of twenty questions. Though he wasn’t physically in the train fight, his adrenaline was still too pumped up to play nice.
I stepped in, with a friendly smile, and offered my hand to shake. “Dee Baker, Colonel MacLaren’s partner. Nice to meet you, Councilman Wiehl. We’re all very tired from the trip. You have transportation for us, to your hotel? I don’t think we need help with the luggage, do we, Emmett?” Indeed, our soldiers had already commandeered the luggage trolleys from the porters.
Wiehl was clearly relieved to be allowed back onto his familiar script. He gratefully led the way to a couple shuttle buses waiting for us on the street. That street was Liberty Avenue, one of the main drags of downtown Pittsburgh. I would have expected limited parking right in front of the train station. But the hotel shuttles were the only vehicles in sight. Our party were the only people in sight.
“Is it always this empty downtown, Mr. Wiehl?” I asked.
“Oh, no one lives in the triangle anymore, Ms. Baker,” he agreed.
I admitted to never having had the pleasure of visiting Pittsburgh before, except the airport, and egged Wiehl on to play tour guide. As a hotel manager, naturally he was happy and competent to oblige. My traveling companions, all still adrenaline-poisoned, quietly eavesdropped while we prattled away. Apparently the Golden Triangle, downtown Pittsburgh, was where the broad Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, flowing west, met in a V to give birth to the mighty Ohio.
Our shuttle turned a corner onto utter devastation. “Tornado,” Wiehl explained. “We had over two hundred touchdowns in the city last year. More in the suburbs, of course. Only twenty-something touchdowns this year, so far. But don’t worry, Ms. Baker – the foundation of my hotel is an excellent tornado shelter. One of the sirens is on our roof.”
Shocked, Emmett asked, “All from a single storm front?”
“Oh, no,” replied Wiehl. “Spread over six months or so. Started getting bad about this time two years ago, with the Alberta Clippers. They just wouldn’t quit.”
“Did you have many Alberta Clippers?” I only remembered a few of those storms in Connecticut that fall. The thunderstorm fronts barreled across the continent out of a blue sky, traveling over 75 miles per hour.
“Oh, yes. Maybe a dozen,” Wiehl supplied. “Ah, here we’re back on Liberty. This is the only undamaged bridge left across the Monongahela.” He pointed downriver, toward a double rail track up a steep hillside. A pile of reddish rubble lay at its base. “Over there is the famous Monongahela Incline. The immigrants who worked in the steel mills built a funicular, so they could live on Mount Washington without having to climb up there after work. The incline isn’t operating anymore. But the Duquesne Incline is still running. The inclines are very popular with tourists. Breath-taking view from the top.”
I smiled at the ‘popular with tourists’ part. Alex Wiehl was an optimistic man. I was probably his first tourist in years. And I was only playing at it in order to ease the social tension. A brief tour couldn’t hurt.
Past the bridge, we turned left along the river and soon pulled up to an ordinary middle-class chain hotel, a long five-story block of brick with a valet zone driveway and portico. The outdoor national brand name signs had been replaced with ‘Monongahela Inn’, so professionally that I wouldn’t have noticed the name change, except that the door mat still bore the original branding.
“Did you work for the company long before the borders closed, Mr. Wiehl?” I asked.
“Yes, fifteen years,” he replied. “I’d only just transferred to Pittsburgh, though. I was in Johnson City before that. Tennessee.”
“And you were elected right away to city council?” I asked, surprised.
“Oh, no, I was just appointed to the council a few months ago,” he demurred. “I joined the Chamber of Commerce right away. Great way to make friends in a new city. Ah – should I just hand out keys and let you people sort out room assignments?” he offered hopefully. “The entire hotel is at your disposal.”
“Johnson,” Emmett ordered. Captain Johnson further delegated, and a sergeant accompanied Mr. Wiehl to the registration desk.
“Our only contact is useless,” Emmett commented to the IBIS team.
I poked him. “Emmett, I think he’s one of the movers behind the Penn–Ohio joint venture. Don’t write him off just because he isn’t who you thought he was. Schwabacher and Taibbi’s re-industrialization plan is important.”
“Uh-huh,” Emmett said sadly.
We both brightened immeasurably when we stepped into the hotel lobby. This provided tastefully bland lounge seating areas, a closed bar, and an open buffet, brimming over with delicious wafts of dinner. Our prisoners were already being escorted to a ground-floor conference room for questioning. The troops stared at the buffet, but apparently hadn’t been given leave to devour it yet.
I didn’t have that problem. I dumped my gear in a booth near the lobby and started filling my plate. Emmett and the IBIS pair followed my lead.
After nearly 24 hours travel from our home in the hungry devastation of New York City, that buffet was just about the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and smelled. We had roast beef. Pork loin. Pot roast. Fried chicken. Macaroni and cheese. A choice of five cooked vegetables. Fresh tossed salad with all the trimmings and choice of four salad dressings. Potatoes three ways. Fresh chicken and dumpling soup. Warm fresh bread. Unlimited butter.
In New England and New York–New Jersey, we didn’t have enough wheat flour to make bread, let alone enough oil to waste on deep-frying. A single plate from this amazing buffet held more treats than any of us in the Apple had eaten in the past six months combined. And that was just the dinner buffet. I carried my mounded plate beyond to stare at the dessert spread. Peach and blueberry and apple pies, blueberry cobbler, yellow cake with frosting, pastries, fresh apples and grapes and a selection of cheeses and crackers. My mouth hung open at the beauty of the colors, the riches arrayed here before us. Apparently sugar wasn’t in short supply here, either.
“You can’t eat your first plate, piglet,” Emmett commented beside me. But he stared at the color-drenched desserts just as raptly as I did. And his dinner plate was mounded even higher than mine, with three different rolls perched precariously on top.
Captain Johnson called out to the troops, “As soon as the Colonel is seated, we will proceed by rank to the buffet. With decorum, ladies and gentlemen.”
We slipped into our booth with alacrity, to let loose the ravening horde.
“You may be right, Ms. Baker,” Kalnietis offered from across our shared table. “Penn has plenty of food.”
I nodded, eyes smiling, teeth sinking into warm fresh bread dripping with real butter, like everyone else at our table. Judging from their plates, our new IBIS friends from greater Virginia were just as starved for wheat and meat and deep fried things as we were.
It seemed briefly that there might be war at the hot buffet, as rolls ran out before the lower-ranked soldiers got any. But a smiling overweight middle-aged woman emerged to save the day with another vast platter of dinner rolls and Texas toast. She was trailed by a possible daughter, around age 20, wheeling out replacement hot trays of more roast beef and fried chicken.
“I like Alex Wiehl,”
I proclaimed, when my mouth was temporarily empty. “I like Penn. The war, completely forgiven.” My dinner companions nodded emphatically, their mouths full.
We could have happily gorged the evening away. But before we had a chance to sample the dessert buffet, the interrogators emerged to report what they’d learned from the prisoners. Wisely, Captain Johnson and his top sergeant had sent in plates for them.
The lead interrogator was Sergeant Tibbs.
Chapter 4
Interesting fact: Strictly speaking, the American ‘Bible Belt’ refers to the southeastern and south-central states, stretching from the Carolinas and Florida in the east, to Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri to the west, where evangelical Protestants rule in religion and politics, and over 60% of adults consider themselves ‘highly religious.’ But there is also a religious gradient between the Northeast, where religion is nearly taboo in public discourse, and the Midwest, with more evangelicals and Bible Belt sensibilities. This religious shift takes place somewhere between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
To my delight, New England – or its top-ranking resource coordinator, at any rate – had sent along my old pal Marine Sergeant Tibbs to aid our investigation. We had an odd relationship, Tibbs and I. He was my jailer once on a Navy ark, when HomeSec arrested me for founding Amenac. In that role, I’d say he helped launch the ideas that led to Project Reunion. Last year, he’d worked security at the conference that officially launched Project Reunion. Tibbs was a quiet lad, methodical and bland, who looked like a dull teenage linebacker. I liked him.
A table was moved to the end of our booth for the two prisoner interrogators and Captain Johnson and his second, Sergeant Becque, to join us. The rest of Johnson’s men and women had naturally chosen seats as far away from the celestial Colonel as the dimensions of the dining room allowed, giving us a modicum of privacy.
Tibbs dove in. “They were after you, Colonel, not the food. They attacked the produce cars because they had visible armed guards. Had to take them out first.” The food train guards rode between and on top of the food container cars. “Unfortunately, these two don’t know much.”
Sergeant Becque offered, “They were easy to catch. Hanging back and avoiding action. Figured they were running the raid.”
“Sorry, no,” said Tibbs. “Just disobeying orders.”
Tibbs summarized what little our captives knew. Their militia leader, Sergeant Lohan, was indeed hanging back from the fray to supervise, and escaped clean. Lohan had told the attacking squad that there were investigators on the train from New York, and they were to prevent the party from reaching Union Station and the city council. Their goal was to take us to another militia leader, Sergeant Bremen.
Beyond that, our sources were of murky understanding. All they really knew about Bremen was that he was Lohan’s boss, and older, maybe 35. They weren’t clear on whether we were to be taken hostage, or if this was just an unfortunate attempt to talk to us. The prisoners weren’t normally in Lohan’s troop, and had refused to attack the train, because that would be looting.
“My advice,” continued Tibbs, “is to set them loose with a message: we want to talk to Lohan and Bremen. I’m not sure they’ll deliver the message. But these guys are no use to us.”
Puzzled, Emmett asked, “Can’t they just give us Lohan’s phone number?”
Tibbs frowned. “Apparently the locals don’t use phones. There are only a few surviving cell towers. We’re sitting under one of them, and the railroad has comms. But no land lines. Tornados played hell with their long-distance cables. The lines are broken everywhere.”
Emmett looked to me. “Sure,” I said. “I can set up a Pittsburgh meshnet after dinner.” That was the messaging network I’d commissioned for the Apple Zone in New York, near-field communications passing phone to phone. The mesh was only good for text messages and low-resolution images, not voice. But it didn’t require any infrastructure. Our mesh software also tracked people and resources on a map. “Could take weeks for people to adopt the system, though, Emmett.”
“No,” said Emmett, “it spreads fast once people know it’s possible. Provided they can charge their phones. But we have power.”
“They don’t,” Tibbs clarified. “Most people don’t have power. They don’t eat like this, either.” He tilted his head to the buffet. “The prisoners were drooling at us while we ate. Furious that the city council was pretending things were all hunky-dory here. Apparently the area around this hotel is an island of the old normal. The citizenry doesn’t have much.”
Tibbs looked thoughtful and tilted his head. “Colonel, I don’t think there are many people left in the city. If we’re going to wait to give them phones and the meshnet, anyway… Maybe I’ll bring them some plates of food. Get chummy. Let them talk about life here.”
Emmett nodded. “Do that. Once you’ve got the gist, I’d like you with me to have another chat with Wiehl later. Thank you, Tibbs.”
Tibbs and his assigned sidekick moved on to the buffet, to select seconds and desserts for themselves, plus a generous feed for the prisoners.
“Is that wise, Colonel?” Kalnietis asked. “To give people communications at this point?”
Emmett shrugged. “Makes it easier to talk to them. And Dee and I can monitor what they say.”
“Spy on them?” Gianetti blurted.
Emmett nodded, and held her eye. “That’s how the meshnet works. Amenac too. And the PR News website, since it’s built on Amenac’s infrastructure. Nothing private about it. All tracked.”
Gianetti didn’t like it. She and Kalnietis really were old-school FBI, out of the loop, if invasion of privacy made them rigid. To me, that was old news. The Calm Act relieved us of any right to privacy, and the martial law governments weren’t rushing to give it back.
I left them to take out my computer in the lobby and set up a meshnet, wondering what kind of Pandora’s box I was about to unleash. If most of Pittsburgh had been offline for two years, since the borders went up, its people had some rude awakenings in store.
I figured the far end of Long Island had more in common with isolated Pittsburgh than our community mesh in New York City did. So I lifted Major Cameron’s configuration files as a starting point. He had a very thin feed of news from outside going to a bulletin board post, along with basic help files, local government orientation, and announcements.
Weather reports and warnings needed to go front and center, of course. I tweaked the parameters for weather and the news feed for Pittsburgh relevance. I dithered a little about whether I should be more even-handed, and provide IndieNews as well as Amenac’s meshnet feed for news. But Indie stories made it to the top 10 on Amenac’s new feed often enough. I couldn’t say anything about the local government, so replaced that with ‘to be completed.’ For now, I introduced our investigation, with links to bios on Project Reunion, Emmett’s and mine, if anyone was curious.
I added a single announcement:
IMPORTANT: Investigating death of Major Dane Beaufort. Witnesses contact @IBISAKalnietis#Beaufort. Pittsburgh community coordinators, contact @RescoEMacLaren#PittCoco. Also wish to speak to Sergeants Lohan and Bremen at @RescoEMacLaren#PittTrain.
With any luck, that should start generating leads for Emmett and Special Agent Kalnietis, neatly sorted into message buckets. For our troops from New York, meshnet propagation was a simple tap on a button. We were already on our neighborhood Brooklyn meshnet, and several others. Everyone else in the hotel with a functioning phone also got a prompt, as the viral software insinuated itself into the neighborhood. I hoped I wouldn’t need to wander through the hotel, person to person, and explain. Nope. Kalnietis, Gianetti, Tibbs, and Wiehl popped onto the net quickly. Kalnietis even took the hint and set his mesh handle correctly to ‘IBISAKalnietis.’
Two more problems to solve. One, I had no intention of donating my equipment to Pittsburgh. I wanted another computer to run the meshnet. Two, I needed more phones to hand out, and recharging centers, to spread the net wider
and faster. The sun had already set, and Pittsburgh hadn’t looked open for business even in daytime. So I thought those challenges would have to wait on tomorrow.
But a brief consultation with hotel manager Wiehl worked wonders. The hotel kept lost-and-found bins of abandoned items. This provided my choice of three laptops, over fifty phones, and all manner of charging cords. And just off the lobby, the hotel featured a high-speed Internet cafe room, where guests could plug in when the WiFi was clogged. The Internet room had charging stations in plenty. All I had to do was warn our door guards, and advertise the charging station on the meshnet resource map.
I’d barely managed to plug in the discarded laptops to start charging before the first locals arrived. By the time I finished sorting out the rejects from my spare phone collection, the room was filling up nicely. I’d explained what was going on to enough locals that they mostly educated each other now.
A rather intent pair of guys in militia camouflage even helped me plug in my spare phones. At a guess, they’d been posted outside to observe the hotel. I popped off a quick note to Tibbs and Emmett about them, but limited myself to being friendly to everyone. Soon Tibbs’ side-kick, Nguyen, wandered in to recharge his phone and lazily kibitz with them.
Mission accomplished in the recharging station. I took my pick of the three free laptops back out to the lobby with me, plugged it back in, and cloned the meshnet master terminal software onto it. Within a few minutes, I was able to let it take over the meshnet traffic load.
Less than two hours from start to finish, and our new meshnet already had over a thousand users. Two more charging centers even advertised themselves on the map. Ours had a waiting line of 40 people the guards kept outside, the limit they’d allow in before we closed for the night at 11:00. Visitors were allowed to charge up to five phones at a time, provided there were enough cables. This kept the parking lot social scene lively, as those turned away bargained with people in line to charge a phone for them. Nguyen and his new pals left their phones plugged in, and wandered outside to continue socializing while they helped insure good behavior.