Project Reunion

by Ginger Booth

  by Ginger Booth

  Copyright © 2016 Ginger Booth

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photo © Hasenonkel | Dreamstime.com - WAR Photo

  Cover design by Ginger Booth.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author‘s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  Maps

  Prologue

  New York, October.

  Gladys Petrosian lived at the top of a twenty-story apartment block in Brooklyn. She hadn’t lived here before Ebola broke out. She colonized this place after the power died. No one else wanted the twenty-floor walk-up. So many had died in the fires last winter, with no way out. They tried to cook in their apartments, or heat themselves in the bitter cold. The buildings caught fire, and there was no water to put the fires out. Yet another horrible way to die.

  But Gladys was more afraid of the people than the flames. No one could give her Ebola, up here, away from them all. No one could kill her for her food. There used to be more people in the lower floors of the building. They’d fallen lower and lower as the food ran out. Too weak to climb.

  There used to be more people.

  The roof was all hers, up above it all. She had half a block’s worth of apartment homes to draw on for raw materials. And canned goods, once, but those were gone. Shower liners made excellent rain catchers for water. Other shower liners, slashed, created an overhead netting to keep the birds out. Or if they got in, the birds were trapped, easy to catch. Pigeon was her favorite. It was a good day, when she caught a pigeon.

  She had a farm up here. Her seed collection was limited. But she’d hoarded a few potatoes until spring, and planted them. Sunflowers. Beans. Basil. Her own home-made manure, she joked. Potting mix from the apartments, odds and ends. It wasn’t much. She was starving, like everyone else. Not that she spoke to anyone else. Not in months.

  A child cried on the fifteenth floor. That had been maddening. Why did he have to climb up her building to die? She would escape up to the roof and sing to herself, so she didn’t have to hear him. She didn’t have enough to share. But the crying finally dwindled and stopped last night. Tomorrow she’d climb down to look, from a cautious distance. Armed with kitchen knives. Maybe.

  Today she cooked the last of the potato harvest. In a solar pizza-box oven, like the ones she taught the kids at PS 282 to make. Seventh grade science. Soon it would be too cold to cook potatoes. There wasn’t enough. There wasn’t nearly enough to make it to spring.

  -o-

  Maisie Mora waded at the edge of a beach near Port Jefferson, Long Island. She didn’t call herself that anymore, though. Syringe was her new name. She traded sex for food, and had for months. If she got the chance. Usually they just took the sex and gave her nothing in return.

  But that one guy was too rough. She’d grabbed a dirty syringe off the ground and stabbed him in the eye with it. Of course he’d beaten her for it, and left her in an alley. Good riddance. The new gang of kids she roamed with wasn’t so bad. But she called herself Syringe to remind them not to mess with her. She wore the syringe on a string around her neck. It wasn’t really the same syringe, just another one she’d found. It made her feel tough, like her father the soldier. Not weak, like Mom, who died of Ebola and left her stranded here, on the wrong shore.

  She gazed out across the Sound. Connecticut was over there, barely visible, a hazy grey line on the horizon. Bridgeport. That’s where the ferry was, to Port Jefferson. She’d taken it across the Sound once with her family. She imagined swimming across, home. Daddy would be so proud of her, swimming across the Sound! But the daydream fractured, crumpled. Daddy wouldn’t be proud of a thirteen year old whore, running with a gang. And it was 10 miles across the Sound here. Syringe couldn’t swim that far, even before, when she had enough to eat.

  She used to fantasize that Daddy would come find her. Or that she’d find the ferry still running in Port Jefferson. She’d tell them what an important soldier her father was in Connecticut. They’d call him for her, and carry her across the Sound, back home.

  That was a long time ago. She didn’t want to be found anymore. She just wanted to eat.

  A hermit crab scuttled over her foot. She grabbed for it, slurped the life out of its tiny body. That didn’t satisfy her hunger at all. But it did inspire her. She made for the tide pools, to hunt for the periwinkles that clung to the rocks. That’s why the other kids put up with her, in the gang. They were city kids who didn’t know how to find anything to eat. But she did. Never enough, but some.

  Chapter 1

  Interesting fact: The final President of the United States was the second who had never been elected.

  I wonder what the Founding Fathers thought they were doing, when they first set out on the American Revolution. They couldn't have foreseen the globe-spanning American empire that would emerge from their friendly debates over a pint of beer in the colonial pubs of Boston or Philadelphia, or the parlors of Virginia. Personally, I was hoping for a romantic weekend getaway. My boyfriend Emmett and I could have used the break.

  It was a rough couple weeks leading up to our summit meeting at the Coast Guard Academy in New London. I was so excited to get the invitation to present, that I convened a meeting of my hacker team the very next day to get started.

  The guys – and they were all guys except for me – lounged around Dave’s industrial loft office space in the center of town. He’d done it up beautifully as a hacker haven. Whiteboards, chalkboards, and giant paper pads adorned the exposed brick walls, interspersed with a nerf-ball hoop and dart board. Power outlets and Gigabyte Internet cables abounded in the work zone. We were selective about what traveled the airwaves, preferring a hard-wired connection controlled by our firewalls. Desk space was a free choice of picnic table, breakfast counter, stand-up desk, or dual-monitor workstation.

  The non-work area was larger, complete with kitchenette, ping-pong, foosball, and the meeting lounge we met in now. That was furnished with a beat-up collection of old couches, folding tray tables, and bright crocheted afghans, all grouped to face a 65-inch monitor that was probably liberated from a sports bar. We had most of the screen set to duplicate my laptop screen, leaving a wide strip along the left to show the two members attending remotely.

  It was a far cry from the Fortune 100 corporate cubicle maze down in Stamford that I used to work out of, only a year before. Not all changes in the world that past year were negative. Not that I’d ever commuted down to Stamford if I could avoid it, anyway. I had a telecommuter office at home. But I’d allowed that pasteurized corporate miasma to invade my personal space via my office, so that I could better relate to the suits in Stamford. This hacker lair felt closer to my real world of granite bays, marshes, woods, orchards, and vegetable gardens. Here even Mangal, my coworker and best friend of a dozen years down in Stamford, sat in stocking feet on a floor pillow.

  “Time,” Mangal announced. Not all of our corporate manager ways had worn off. Mangal and I were still sticklers for beginning a meeting on time. “Dee Baker called the meeting. What’s up, Dee?”

  “Thank you, Mangal,” I began, “and thank you all for coming on such short notice.” I met each of the seven present by eye, and looked directly into the video camera for the off-site attendees. “This is big, guys. Niedermeyer has convened a summit meeting in New London in two weeks, at the Coast Guard Academy. You’ll remember Captain Niedermeyer. He’s the Power in the Coast Guard and Navy around here.

 
; “Now the Calm Act plan says we do nothing about New York, or open any borders, until March at the earliest. But we all know that the Ebola survivors in the city can’t wait another five months for relief. They’re starving, they’re dying, they’re our neighbors.” I paused, and was glad to see that most of the gang nodded solemn agreement. Not all. Our graphic designer Will, also late of UNC in Stamford, frowned and wriggled in discomfort on the couch. Leland, our man in Canadian intelligence who attended remotely today, just pursed his lips.

  I pressed on. “As I understand it, Niedermeyer’s concept is to re-unite the Northeast around the grand cause of relieving New York City. The summit meeting is to present proposals for how we can do that – and whether it’s safe.” I tossed that last bone to Will, whose wiggle quotient was building toward an interruption. Will reported to me for years at UNC. I knew all too well when he was about to erupt. He subsided into the couch with a huff.

  “Now, I’ve caught two parts of this,” I pressed on. “I’m asking for help with both of them. Two people from the New Haven area have been invited to present at the summit – Emmett, and me. You know Emmett as my boyfriend.” That got a couple of chuckles. But I added an explanation for the benefit of the Amen1 hackers I didn’t know as well. “Major Emmett MacLaren is also the lead community resource coordinator – the Resco – for the greater New Haven area –”

  “We’re under martial law. He’s our marshal,” Popeye interrupted with a summary. As with all of the Amen1 hacker half of the Amenac partnership, I didn’t know his real name. I barely knew Popeye at all. The full-body tribal tattoos and piercings, under black biker leathers, didn’t fit my usual social circle. He wore black wraparound sunglasses, even late at night. I found him hard to connect to.

  “Close enough,” I agreed, with a sunny smile. He scowled back. I’d never seen him without a scowl, so that was fine. “Anyway, Emmett plans to present an overall proposal for the relief of New York –”

  “Overall proposal?” Leland cut in. That surprised me. Our Canadian intelligence representative rarely said a word during our meetings. Judging from his video feed, he was suddenly and intently researching something on his own computer.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty ambitious,” I agreed. “Especially with only two weeks to prepare. He calls it a ‘framework.’ So, Emmett’s asked for our help to pull that together, to do the research and present it effectively. I think a couple other, um, ‘military marshals’, have agreed to help, too.

  “But second, I’ve also been invited to present. So, I want to showcase what Amenac has done for the world so far, and what we can do to support and coordinate on the civilian side, if we go forward with helping New York. Like the missing persons lost-and-found database you guys threw together after the quakes and tsunami on the west coast last winter. That was an outstanding contribution to the world. Based on that, we can do a lot to support the New York effort. An online clearing house for people to volunteer. We need an inventory of skills, food, housing, Ebola vaccine doses, you name it. There’s just a lot of data and communications to pull together. And we’ve got the framework and track record to do that on the public side. Without getting shut down for violating the Calm Act, like everyone else does.”

  Belatedly I clicked up my presentation for today onto the big screen, and flipped forward to a staffing sketch labeled ‘Dream Team.’ “Now obviously, guys, who does what, depends on who wants to do what. But I mean it when I say ‘Dream Team.’ We’ve got the people to perform miracles here, if you’re willing to come on board. If I get all my wishes, this is a suggested division of labor.”

  I let them digest the list for a minute. I had four columns – the New York relief plan, the Amenac show and tell, both, and neither. The ‘neither’ column was necessary, because we had to keep our existing operations up and running. On the content end, we had legions of volunteer moderators minding the shop. But keeping the servers up, and thwarting the Federal watchdogs trying to shut us down, kept Popeye busy full-time. He led a remote server team that didn’t attend our steering committee meetings. I didn’t need to know who or where they were, but the Canadian Leland probably represented several of them.

  Mangal and I could also pull in about a half dozen more UNC alumni from outside this steering group. How many Amen1 hackers were represented by the six attending this meeting, was something we were not invited to know. So the names on my list were just the principals present at the meeting, not the full number of people who might be deployed.

  I considered and discarded several more sales pitches. This wasn’t a group who responded well to cheerleader nonsense. “So that’s the ask, and those are the stakes. Of course, I’m all in. Emmett is loaning me back Shelley from the barricades for a couple weeks. Mangal? Thanks! I knew I could count on you. So – discussion?”

  Popeye jumped in first. “I can’t believe this fucking shit, whore!” Actually, that’s a cleaned up version of what he said. There was more in that vein, involving my choice of boyfriends and what I did with them, followed by, “No fucking way you’ll use Amen1 to back the evil empire!”

  My mouth was hanging open.

  Our host Dave, the Amen1 public spokesman, interjected calmly, “Popeye, I think we’d all feel more comfortable in these meetings if you could dial down the profanity.”

  The Amen1 white-hat hackers were a motley crew, but Dave looked and acted like a successful 50-something real estate agent, in a casual but oh-so-very-expensive grey suit and cashmere pullover. Much as I wished he was the leader – and he acted like it – Dave insisted that he wasn’t. My Stamford UNC alumni contingent didn’t know who Amen1’s leader was. What Leland of Canadian intelligence knew, I wouldn’t hazard a guess.

  Mangal, Leland, and Will nodded emphatically to the proposal of cutting the profanity. The other Amen1 hackers nodded more in resignation. Like me, I suspect they weren’t sure Popeye knew how to speak politely.

  “Fucking whore!” repeated Popeye. “Whore to the evil empire!”

  “Excuse me, Popeye,” I attempted, “but what exactly do you mean by the ‘evil empire?’”

  “Fucking U.S. of A. Especially the pigs.”

  “The ‘pigs’ being...the U.S. Army?” I hazarded faintly. Or Emmett?

  “With respect, Popeye, I’d like to re-frame this,” said Dave. Unlike Mangal and I, Dave hadn’t lost his cool in the slightest. “Dee, I think several in Amen1 have a certain, ah, commitment to anarchy. Bypassing the Federal government to liberate information that ought to be free – that’s a natural fit for us. I think what Popeye is saying, is that assisting a military operation is, um, an unnatural fit.”

  “Fucking A!” agreed Popeye. He rose, intentionally throwing his folding chair backward to clatter on the floor. He looked to another hacker, Mel, as though expecting Mel to get up and storm out with him. Mel shrugged. Popeye slammed his way out of the loft.

  Damn, I didn’t know that about Mel, that he was so ideologically close to Popeye. A few years older than Mangal and me, Mel was another mild-mannered corporate refugee, a computer engineer out of Boston. I wouldn’t have hesitated to invite Mel, and his somewhat intense wife Jeannie, over to my house for dinner with Emmett and my foster-teen Alex.

  I must have stared at Mel for a moment. In the quiet pause after Popeye’s slamming door, Mel offered with a smile, “Count me in. That assignment looks good to me.” I had him penciled in on ‘both’ projects.

  “Thank you, Mel,” I said faintly. I smiled, but I suspect it came out crooked.

  “Excellent re-framing, Dave,” said the middle-aged black guy under Leland on the video display. He went by ‘Genghis.’ I’d never met him except by video. “I think that focuses on a key issue for me. Why does this need to be a military operation. Dee?”

  “Thank you, great question,” I replied. “I guess it has to be, because it already is? New York is surrounded by armed borders, just like we are. To allow millions out of New York, or major relief personnel and supplies in, and set
up quarantine zones for safety, we need at least the tolerance of the border forces. And Niedermeyer is inviting proposals that go way beyond that. To throw the resources of all the regional armed forces – Army, National Guard, Coast Guard, Navy, and so on – into solving New York. Or at least, that’s what Emmett’s framework proposal will involve. Whether Niedermeyer and the other powers-that-be will go for it, remains to be seen.

  “To get back to that ‘evil empire’ thing... Whether or not you agree with what the U.S. military has been used for in the past – they’re damned good at logistics. When we’re talking about controlled movement of millions of people, without letting loose an Ebola epidemic on the rest of the Northeast – we’re talking major logistics here.”

  Genghis nodded thoughtfully. “Thank you.” Above him on the screen, the Canadian Leland nodded impatiently, as though all that were obvious. Fair enough. I thought so, too, but many people had a hard time thinking with large numbers.

  “Does that require Washington’s...tolerance...as well?” asked Dave.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I would know more after the summit meeting. But, I may not have a need to know. I suspect Niedermeyer’s going out on a limb. For what it’s worth.”

  Will couldn’t bottle it up anymore. “I hope Washington flattens the guy. Come on! The Ebola risk isn’t worth it. Yeah, I’m sorry they’re all gonna die in New York. And the Calm Act sucks. And Congress had no fucking right to do that, to pen us all up like cattle inside borders. But they did it. And the stupid plan has advantages. Like, we’re not gonna die of Ebola on this side of the border. No one has the right to risk our survival here by letting them out of New York.”

  “That’s the concern,” I agreed quietly. “That’s Emmett’s challenge, to come up with a framework of a plan that allows us to carry out the humanitarian mission, saving lives, without risking lives. Or rather, not risking lives beyond the military ones. Acceptable risks, as he put it.” I swallowed. By that yardstick, Emmett counted his own life as an acceptable risk.