Martial Lawless (Calm Act Book 3)

by Ginger Booth

  I blew my breath out and watched Christopher work, and leaned back into Emmett. Another question or two came up, and I answered them. After 5 minutes more, Christopher declared himself to be all set, and I didn’t see anything more I could contribute to ease his chores.

  I turned and planted a kiss on Emmett’s nose. “Now do I finally get to ask?”

  “No,” said Emmett. “Now we eat dinner.” He laughed out loud at the expression on my face. “Short dinner break, Drum?” he called over to her. Major Drumpeter was sitting at her computer, frequently talking over a headset. She nodded for us to go ahead.

  So Emmett and I got to eat at the buffet before all hell broke loose on Pittsburgh.

  Chapter 20

  Interesting fact: Pittsburgh rebounded from the fall of American steel with high-tech industries, robotics, pharmaceuticals, and health care. It was also home to H.J. Heinz ketchup and pickle manufacture.

  “Our steeds have arrived?” Emmett asked Drum, as soon as we were back in the situation room. Maddeningly, eating at the buffet meant that Emmett couldn’t tell me anything over dinner about what came next. We didn’t linger long, though.

  Drum grinned. “Ready to roll, sir. Colonel McNaughton is eager to say hello.”

  A lazy smile bloomed on Emmett’s face. “Old Naughty, huh? Look forward to catching up after the funeral. I’ll call him in a minute. First, time we brief our team, Drum. Dee’s about to strangle someone.”

  “Yes, sir,” Drum agreed. She took a parade rest sort of stance at the front of the room. “Your attention please. As you’ve gathered, tonight’s operation is to disarm the civilian population of Allegheny County, with especial focus on the militia. Who have been fired.”

  “Very fired,” Emmett confirmed. He perched lazily on a table corner near Drum.

  “We believe there are about 1400 active militia in the county,” Drum continued. “We know where most of them live. There are also roughly 1.1 million civilians. At the usual rate of private gun ownership in America, we estimate well over a million weapons in private hands. We hope to disarm everyone inside this line around the city proper.” She used a laser pointer to draw a ring around the inner suburbs. “And possibly trouble spots outside the line.

  “Due to previous attacks on Colonel MacLaren and Major Beaufort,” she continued, pointing to the locations of those attacks, plus the mysteriously framed Green Tree, “we will begin by disarming the downtown triangle between the rivers, and our own environs here across the Monongahela. After a delay of a couple hours to assess effectiveness, we will either double down in those areas, or commence disarming this region northwest of downtown, where fighting has also been heavy.

  “Obviously, we cannot accomplish this with our few troops here and the 900-member Pittsburgh P.D.,” she continued. “Those forces will continue to secure our immediate neighborhood. And contribute armored loudspeaker vehicles to communicate with the populace. The sweep to collect arms will be carried out by Colonel MacLaren’s alma mater, the 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky.” She beamed at him.

  “Part of the 101st, anyway,” Emmett agreed. “Ten thousand troops, experienced in counter-insurgency in the sandbox. Supported by truck transport from the Ohio line, and the Penn Air Force.”

  Ten thousand troops was only part of the 101st Airborne? My mind boggled.

  “Question, sir?” Tibbs raised his hand. “The 101st wasn’t distributed to border garrison duty?”

  “Nope,” Emmett confirmed. “Ken-Tenn decided on border surveillance, plus a centralized mobile force to deploy to handle problems. Suits the thinly settled rough terrain, and the fighting style of the 101st.”

  “Niedermeyer will want to know if they offer markers,” Tibbs said, on behalf of his New England master.

  Emmett shook his head. “Not available for Hudson or New England. Or I might have hit them up myself before. But like me, Dane Beaufort was 101st. Otherwise they wouldn’t visit Penn, either. It’s nearly 600 miles.”

  Brooklyn to Pittsburgh was under 400 miles. I could relate to the effort required these days. Traveling sucked in our new world. These troops had come a long way out of their way to get shot at. And it seemed very likely indeed that they’d be fired upon. Americans do like their guns.

  “Our job,” Drum resumed, “is oversight and coordination from the civilian perspective. We’re taking input from the populace.” I supposed eavesdropping was a form of taking input. “Leads on arsenals, complaints, watching for trouble spots. The PA Air Force is providing aerial surveillance. Operational command lies with the 101st Airborne. But we are in effect the civilian authorities.”

  No doubt I looked suitably dubious. But the martial law governments did consider Rescos to be the spokespersons for civilian interests. In New England and Hudson, this seemed less problematic, since the Rescos policed each other pretty thoroughly. In Penn, Drum and Beaufort had been on their own, completely free agents. Their government hadn’t even noticed when they mutinied.

  “Drum is in command here,” Emmett added. “I choose to assist and advise. What we tell the world outside this room may differ. This operation is approved by Penn, Ken-Tenn, Ohio, Hudson, and New England. Greater Virginia chose to neither approve nor disapprove. Ontario was informed as a courtesy. None of them will interfere.”

  “Any more questions?” Drum asked brightly. “No? Then back to your stations!”

  I didn’t imagine they could find every gun, even with house to house searches and scans. But no doubt they’d lean extra hard on known militia members and hostile households. If a courteous grandpa hid his backup pistol in a vacuum cleaner bag, he’d probably get away with it. We weren’t concerned with courteous grandpas.

  I didn’t have a station or task, particularly. But Emmett snared me, and had me close the mesh subnets for the first three attack areas, plus the wide exurb subnets.

  Then he and Drum were both busy on the phone with the 101st forces. I looked over Drum’s two computers. She had one set to the meshnet admin interface, and another running the military map showing on the big screen. In effect, the meshnet map was us communicating status to them, and the military map communicated their status to us.

  But her view was cluttered with church rants and yesterday’s fights. I got on my own computer and sifted and filtered my meshnet map view to convey only the information I might want to keep the 101st apprised of. Reported arsenals. Weapons theft. Outbreaks of violence and other new markers since the first curfew announcement. I added another privileged layer called Misc in case I thought of anything else later. And I packaged that up with a brief introduction and a link to regenerate that map view and legend, and sent it to Drum with a red flag, in case she found it useful.

  She read my message within a minute, and switched her mesh map view immediately. She looked it over, and forwarded it on to the 101st. I got a big thumbs up and grateful grin from her. Emmett peered at it and gave me a big smile, too.

  At loose ends again, I looked around to see where else I might be useful. I forwarded my ‘101st view map’ to Tibbs. If he was in charge of escalation, that was a good place to put things. I drifted over to him, and we chatted about that for a while. Aside from marking people for later investigation or jail time, he wasn’t unduly stretched handling email escalation. Renata and Nguyen were riveted to their screens reviewing keyword-flagged civilian message traffic, but they seemed in the groove.

  “Dammit!” said Christopher. I’d just been wondering about him, still bent laboring over his maps. Surely all the civilian arsenal reports would have come in by now. Perhaps we needed to sort them by subnet location to get the information complete for the 101st active areas.

  “How can I help?” I offered, sinking into a chair beside him.

  “I don’t know if it’s a bug or what,” he complained. “But I could swear I’ve placed a bomb marker here before. But it’s gone. How am I screwing this up?”

  There wasn’t anything to screw up. If you co
uld see the marker on the map, it was added. Or at least queued to be added. I opened my phone map to the location, and sure enough, his most recent marker appeared. I recognized the neighborhood from previous mysterious clashes where Judgment appeared, then disappeared. Drum and I were looking at the same area just last night.

  “You’re doing fine, Christopher,” I assured him. “I’ll look into it. How many messages do you have left to go?”

  He rubbed his hair in frustration. “I keep going back, because markers have disappeared.”

  “OK, don’t do that anymore,” I said. I created him an escalation route, to send me any message where he needed to add a marker where he thought another had disappeared. “Just go forward at full speed. Are you about half through? More?”

  “About a third,” he said, dispirited.

  I took his remaining queue and sorted them by subnet. Then I selected the subnets where the 101st was already going in for action, and put them at the top of the list. “Let me know as soon as you get through these, OK? These are the priority. Then maybe you can take a breather.” He snorted in appreciation, thanked me, and got back to work.

  “Dee?” Emmett inquired, as I sank back in front of my own computer. “Problem?”

  “Could be, could be,” I allowed grimly. “Tell you when I know.”

  Tibbs told Renata and Nguyen to let him know if they escalated anything urgent – recommending people for jail could wait – and took up a seat next to mine to observe. I gave him a brief smile of welcome, and otherwise ignored him for the moment.

  It took me fifteen minutes of hacking about, but I managed to get a log of all edits to bomb markers not done by Christopher, Drum, or myself. That should have been an empty list, but instead there were six other mesh ids editing the bomb markers. Tibbs had tweaked two, Emmett one, and they verbally confirmed this. Which brought us down to four editors, and seventeen affected markers.

  Interesting question number one: where were these people? One was in the low spot south of the hotel, between Mount Washington and the next rise, a couple miles away. I was beginning to mentally dub that neighborhood Judgment valley. Christopher’s latest missing marker was roughly thataway, too.

  The other three bomb marker editors were currently in the hotel. Two of them right on top of each other and looking like one. A little-known feature of the meshnet we found handy, especially in the high-rises of Manhattan, was that markers stored elevation as well as 2-d map location. No budging those two coincident mesh phones. They were on one person. That was interesting. And they seemed to be between the 3rd and 4th floor.

  “He’s on the lobby doors,” Tibbs said, pointing to the third editor’s icon. A quiet and careful observer, my pal Tibbs. He’d silently followed everything I’d done, over my shoulder. “I bet the other one’s in the stairwell. With double phones. Want me to get eyeball identification of who? In addition to electronic,” he offered.

  I thought about that. “Or just take them?” I suggested.

  He considered that. “I want to know who,” he decided. “Before spooking them.”

  I nodded. Tibbs texted someone to walk down the stairs from the 4th floor, and text him back, then went out for a bathroom break to identify the bodies on guard duty on the hotel entrance.

  I looked back to my computer to notice that Drum and Emmett were standing in front of me, arms crossed. “Update?” Emmett inquired mildly.

  “We have four mesh phones editing the arsenal map data, who shouldn’t be,” I reported. “One in Judgment Valley south of the hotel. Three inside the hotel, on two persons. One on guard at entrance, one in the stairwell with two phones. Tibbs is attempting visual ID on which persons. I’m about to look at their data tracks. This marker,” I paused to bring up the map again, and snorted a laugh. “This marker that’s missing, yet again, is a suspected Judgment arsenal. High priority.”

  “Or a trap,” Emmett murmured. “Alright, thank you.” He turned to get on the phone again with 101st command to direct their most ardent attention on that spot.

  Drum was still standing over me. “Do we have any idea how much of our communications are compromised?”

  A movement caught my eye on the screen. The suspect guard on the door moved, possibly to the other side of the door. “Everything on the meshnet,” I answered Drum absently. “Please go away.” I didn’t take my eye off the suspects on the screen, so I don’t know how she took that.

  In a few minutes, Tibbs came back. Nguyen immediately greeted him with, “Tibbs, I got a hit on ‘Canber.’”

  “Hell,” said Tibbs. “OK, Nguyen, that has to wait.”

  “Canber!” said Emmett, alarmed. “Tibbs, why did you keyword Canber?”

  “What’s ‘Canber’?” I attempted.

  “I said wait,” Tibbs insisted, and came to me. “Goff and Sharif are on the entrance. Goff crossed to the other side while I was in the bathroom. Sharif stayed put.”

  “It’s Goff, then,” I said, “from Brooklyn.”

  “Breckenridge from Meadville on the stairs,” Tibbs added. “Has he moved?”

  “Gone dark. On all three phones, including his official one,” I reported. “Goff went dark on the hack phone, and his official one was still alive. Where…” I refreshed the screen. “No. Both gone. Drat.”

  “Notifying Pittsburgh P.D. and Captain Johnson,” Tibbs said, stepping urgently to his keyboard.

  “Canber,” Emmett repeated forcefully.

  “Colonel, please wait,” Tibbs insisted. “Dee?”

  “Emmett,” I said, touching his arm, “we were infiltrated via Drum’s troops and our own. Sharif’s been with us how long? And they’re running. Give Tibbs a chance to catch them. They won’t be easy. Not if they could do this.”

  Emmett scowled. “They had overrides to edit the map. We all did. No big deal.”

  “No, Emmett,” I insisted. “They didn’t use our access to edit the map. Those phones were on meshnet id 666. Sound familiar?”

  “Hell,” he said. He raised his voice. “I still need a debrief on Canber,” he said forcefully for Tibbs’ benefit. Tibbs hunched deeper into his followup. A methodical young man, my friend Tibbs.

  “What’s Canber?” I repeated doggedly.

  “You don’t need to know about Canber,” Emmett murmured.

  A boom shook the hotel. I flinched, and glanced up at the wall display map of 101st operations. “It’s alright,” Drum assured us, though she looked deeply concerned herself. “The 101st called in an air strike on the arsenal in Judgment Valley. Decided it was too wonky to approach with infantry.”

  “But that was a civilian house!” I objected. From the map, it looked like a close-packed neighborhood, too, like Dane’s. Homes were only steps apart, mixed in with blocky apartment buildings.

  “Don’t judge, Dee,” Emmett advised me quietly. “Can’t second-guess the commander in the field.”

  Drum conceded sadly, “There is likely to be collateral damage. We expected some tonight, Dee.”

  What I expected was firefights with guns, one on one. I didn’t expect aerial bombardment. Then again, I expected some incompetent drooling lunatic fringe of a religious sect. Not one that could hack into our our meshnet from their own clandestine copy, and infiltrate our guard detail. Deep cover infiltration, at that. Goff lived in the barracks brownstone next door to me in Brooklyn. He ran in the mornings with Emmett, doing laps around our mini-city town green. Captain Johnson’s company was a hand-picked group of trusted soldiers, or so I was told. Lunatic or no, our adversary seemed amazingly competent at hacking and the spy craft. Both Amen1 and Canada’s best hackers had certified the security on our meshnet from the ground up.

  If Judgment were that good, or rather that capable, then maybe a bomb really was the best idea. “OK,” I conceded to Drum, and sighed. I looked to Tibbs, still working furiously, and my eye settled on Renata, between me and Tibbs. If forces unknown had slipped in or subverted Goff and Breckenridge, how did we know that everyone in this roo
m was legitimate?

  “Renata,” I said calmly, “what can you tell us about Breckenridge?”

  “Nothing,” she said too quickly. She hunched toward her screen, intently following her message stream instead of paying attention to the drama around her. Some might call that being a good soldier. To me, it just looked fishy. No one was that incurious. I frowned at her.

  I located the Canber message and forwarded a copy to Emmett for safekeeping, without reading it.

  I looked back, and Christopher started to volunteer something, but I shook my head slightly. “So Renata, how long have you worked with Breckenridge?”

  Emmett had his phone out, tapping a message. His poker face was excellent. I had no idea if he was following up on Renata or Canber, or something else entirely. Tibbs, beside Renata, had paused in his work to pay attention to my questioning her.

  “I don’t remember,” Renata lied, leaning farther into her computer screen.

  Tibbs took her in a head-lock and rolled her chair backward, away from her computer. I noted sadly that she didn’t deny anything, or profess her innocence. Another real pro, aside from her weak acting ability. It’s not enough to say the right things. It takes believing with the whole mind and body, to generate the right body language.

  “We’ll talk to you later, Renata,” Drum promised softly. “Too busy right now.”

  Tibbs handed Renata off to Sergeant Becque and another soldier at the door. They closed the door while they processed her. But when Tibbs came back in, he laid a cell phone, a shiv, a pocket-knife, wallet, and boots on a side table, to look over later. No doubt the other guards would strip-search her and put her into pajamas, and deliver the rest of her clothes to Tibbs later.

  Or not Tibbs. Apparently Emmett had the same thought. “Dee, could you brief the IBIS agents on this for me? I’d like them to follow up on our staffing problems. I need you and Tibbs here. And a replacement email sifter.”

  “Two more email sifters,” I said. “One to go back over what Renata was supposed to monitor the past few hours.” Off the cuff, I suggested, “I like Penny and Qwanisha.”