Rhapsody For The Tempest (The Braintrust Book 3)

by Marc Stiegler

  Then the Premier had a terrible realization. That bastard could have gotten the super-key from the Premier himself.

  It was obvious in retrospect. That bastard would let the Premier do the heavy lifting of constructing the super-key and putting the whole thing on his own laptop. Then the BrainTrust would use a technique not unlike the one used just now to deliver the polonium, only this time install a virus on the laptop rather than leaving a box on the lid. One stop shopping for the geeks of the BrainTrust.

  He still wasn’t certain Colin had the key. But he had to assume so. For a wild moment, he considered getting all the computers in the Russian government and military upgraded with BrainTrust chips to lock those bastards out. But that would deprive not only Colin but also himself of the ubiquitous spying capability so necessary to the maintenance of his rule.

  Calming down, the Premier realized that maintaining total information awareness for himself was so important he had to tolerate the BrainTrust’s ownership of the same power.

  He was quite sure now that he would continue to wake up with dreams about dealing decisively with the BrainTrust. But he was also quite sure that, even after a month of such dreams, he would take no action.

  The governor stood outside the briefing room, waiting for the place to fill with reporters, controlling his urge to cheer. These were exciting times. California had not started a new welfare program for over a decade. He would now achieve a goal that had eluded his predecessor for his entire career.

  A lot of billionaires had escaped the forfeiture proceedings, but enough had not. Not only had the resulting windfall balanced the state’s budget, but it had also actually created the first surplus in the governor’s lifetime.

  He had initially planned to put the surplus into a rainy day fund. But when the California legislature found out they had money to spare, they moved swiftly to seize the opportunity. Sure, the windfall was a one-time-only affair. Yes, revenues from both business taxes and real estate taxes were collapsing.

  But the people in the legislature were politicians. They knew surely, as surely as an astronomer knows the sun will rise, that the businesses would return and the real estate market would rise—because they always had in the past.

  And the politicians necessarily believed that once a new level of revenue had been achieved, that somehow that much revenue would continue to flow in all future years, no matter how murky the mechanism for such a flow might be. Windfall or not, this was the only chance they were ever likely to have to start a new program.

  In the next few minutes the governor would make the announcement that the Affordable Child, Worker, and Consumer Protection Program would kick off immediately.

  But even the ACWCPP was not the big news. The Attorney General had found a wondrous silver lining in the departure of the billionaires.

  The AG had revealed his insight during a discussion of the civil forfeiture cases being prepared. The governor remembered it clearly.

  The AG had started with the bad news. “You probably won’t be surprised to hear that a number of companies are moving their operations to Red states, the disloyal bastards.”

  The governor had shrugged. In retrospect, he could see that this was inevitable fallout from the SpaceR debacle. “What about their billionaire owners?”

  The AG growled. “Even the ones who’re leaving their businesses in California are moving out of the state. Disloyal bastards.”

  The AG brightened. “At least the heirs of billionaires seem to be staying. In particular, the grandchildren of billionaires past seem to have developed a keen sense of entitlement, and have disregarded Postrel’s warnings.” He offered his own version of a joke. “We are about to give them something that’s referred to in the field of education as ‘a teachable moment.’”

  The governor laughed although he did not find it half as humorous as his AG. Still, when a fool has money, you have to hurry to be the one who parts them.

  The AG’s mood darkened once again. “I came to talk with you about some of the millionaires who were not at the top of our list before, but who have come up as the others departed. They could be a problem.”

  “Like who?”

  “All the big companies and their CEOs who haven’t yet committed to moving to Red States. Fact is, we need them.”

  The governor raised his eyebrow. This was an astonishing confession coming from the AG. “What kinds of companies?”

  “GPlex, FB, others like them. I’m thinking about going ahead and running forfeitures on their CEOs anyway. It’s not like they could move to a Red state—they’re pretty much chained here so they can take ferries and copters out to meet with their teams on the BrainTrust. They really can’t get away.”

  “Please reflect.” The governor just sat and stared at his AG until the AG figured out the pesky little problem.

  “Oh, right. They could just move everything to the BrainTrust.” The AG frowned. “I guess we have to leave them alone.”

  “Will they believe that we’ll leave them alone?”

  The AG shrugged. “We’ll tell them. We’ll give them a written commitment of immunity to forfeiture if necessary.”

  “It would look really bad if they told the other companies, or worse the media, about their special treatment.”

  The AG agreed reluctantly. “I suppose.” He pondered the matter for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “Got it. We’ll send the immunity guarantee in a ‘California Security Letter,’ with a non-disclosure clause. Anyone who violates the non-disclosure clause gets hard jail time.”

  The governor nodded appreciatively. “Just like the National Security Letters the feds have been sending out for decades. Deals forced upon the corporations to violate their customers, that are required by law to be kept secret. Excellent.” He had another thought. “What about the venture capitalists? So many big companies need them to get started, shouldn’t we give them a pass too?”

  The AG swung back into normalcy with a fierce glare. “We can’t be offering giveaways like this to everybody. We have to draw the line someplace.” He choked on his next words. “Maybe a couple of them. If they promise to fund some startups created by unemployed people. But not a lot of them.”

  “Sounds like a reasonable compromise.”

  “I’ll send you a draft list of California Security Letter recipients this afternoon.” The AG had risen from his chair when he remembered something. “Oh, one last thing. It turns out there is at least a little good news about all the departing billionaires.”

  The governor gave him a look of astonishment. “Good news? Who are you, really, and what have you done with my Attorney General?”

  The AG chuckled. “Okay, okay. Take a look at this.” He slaved the wallscreen to his tablet and popped a graph. “This is the inequality chart over time. You know we keep this in real-time now. It’s too important not to keep up to date.”

  The governor nodded. He looked at it himself several times a day.

  “Okay, so here’s the way things used to work before Postrel’s article. As you can see, every time there was a big recession, the equality would soar as the stock market collapsed and the wealthy became less so. Then when the Fed started printing money, it would pop the stock market faster than the rest of the economy, so the inequality would soar to new highs.” He pointed further along the line. “Then the rest of the economy would start to catch up as the stock market plateaued and unemployment fell, and the equality numbers would improve once again.”

  The governor nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes, as predictable as a game of billiards. Old news. What’s different now?”

  The AG pointed yet again. “Here’s where Postrel published her article on forfeiture. As you can see, ever since inequality has been falling. Getting rid of the billionaires, even if they escape forfeiture, is really improving our equality numbers.”

  The governor had started to smile, and the smile had expanded into a grin. “With equality improvements like these, I’m looking at a ten p
oint rise in the polls. This is magnificent.”

  The sound of the introducer announcing him interrupted the governor’s reverie. He went to the podium, waving for his adoring fans. “As you know, we are here to announce the start of the Affordable Child, Worker, and Consumer Protection Program. It will transform our society just as our earlier programs have. But first I want to make an announcement.”

  He took a deep breath. “On this day, we embark on a bold new journey. Because of new policies and commitments implemented by my administration, we have set a new record for equality in our state. We are going to set more records. At last, we will be able to raise our voices as one. Equality for all!” he shouted.

  And the crowd shouted back.

  The first few days of any trek, Jam reminded herself, were the hardest. Now she only had a couple of hundred more days to go. The wind whistled across the frost-covered Siberian landscape like cold, harsh laughter.

  Jam saw smoke over the next rise and wondered what she would find when she got there. Hopefully, she would find water. Yes, she’d been walking over snow for days, but people who lived with snow knew it was unsatisfactory as a source of water: it took a huge amount of snow to make a little bit of water, and warming it up enough to melt using the heat in her mouth was no fun either. Eating snow slowed the rate of dehydration, but make no mistake, you could die of thirst surrounded by the stuff.

  No one had seen her since leaving the dacha, of that she was reasonably sure. A couple of times copters had gone by—big, black, cumbersome things loaded with weapons—but she had been surrounded by trees. They might have found her on infrared, but she suspected such niceties of combat were unavailable to the troops stationed in this part of the backcountry.

  The days had not passed unproductively. Jam had learned a smattering of Russian while in the Pakistani Army, enough to curse fluently and demand a beaten enemy surrender, though her fellow troops tended to laugh about needing more to know how, when beaten, to offer a surrender. She had been able to follow the conversation with Tatiana only because of her cell phone and its translator. But for the last three days she had practiced, practiced, and practiced a handful of critical phrases until she thought she might be fluent enough for a short conversation that would not give her foreign origins away. She learned new languages with considerable ease, which was how she’d wound up getting an immersive training in English in the first place. She figured she had at least one chance in twenty of entering the village, buying supplies, and escaping again without too much suspicion.

  While practicing Russian, she had also contemplated the big question with no good answer: to buy supplies or steal them? Because her confidence in her Russian had improved, she had decided to buy. She enjoyed having the choice: when escaping from her husband in Pakistan she had not had enough money to make an analytical decision. This time, she had money, having exchanged a wad of Chinese renminbi for rubles before starting her two-woman assault on the Russian empire. If she bought off the locals with large tips, would they stay bought? Vasily could probably tell her. She could call Julissa, have her put Vasily on the phone, and ask him. She should call anyway just to make sure Vasily hadn’t murdered everybody and stolen the copter.

  Of course, calling anybody was out of the question. If she used her cell, the authorities could track her message traffic even if they could not eavesdrop on her conversation, her phone being of BrainTrust vintage. A phone connection to a BrainTrust location, or anyplace outside Siberia for that matter, would be a dead giveaway. Too dangerous.

  It took longer than expected to reach the village: a deep ravine, quite invisible until you were upon it, lay between her and her goal. Going around was easy but time consuming. She entered the store as the sun fell.

  Her engagement to procure supplies went surprisingly well. The store owner showed a magnificent lack of interest in anything except her rubles.

  The success at the store made her wonder if she were being too cautious. As she passed the little place that seemed to serve as a restaurant, the aroma of real food overpowered her good sense. Hesitating only a moment, she rushed inside and sat down at a tiny table.

  A woman approached her. “And so, comrade, what would you like today? I recommend the cooked cabbage with sour cream, and the black bread slathered in butter.” The woman scrutinized what little she could see of Jam beneath the coat and scarf. “You need them. Eat up. Calories disappear in the cold.”

  Jam spoke ever so carefully. “What else do you have?”

  The woman smiled so warmly it was hard not to respond. “We also have cabbage with sour cream, and black bread slathered in butter.”

  Jam smiled back. “I think I’ll have that, then.”

  The woman nodded. “Good choice.”

  People came and went. Some sat and laughed quietly together. Everyone glanced her way at least once, but left her alone and did not seem ready to confront this odd stranger in town. Jam soaked in the warmth, despite understanding that the more comfortable she became, the harder it would be to leave.

  Dinner was delicious. If she’d been served the same food on the BrainTrust, she suspected she would have gagged, but under these circumstances, it was a remarkable repast.

  She had just about warmed up when the sound of trucks rolling to a stop shook the flimsy walls. Conversations throughout the room died. The faces around the tables turned blank or, in the case of some of the younger patrons, downright sullen.

  Two men in uniforms barged through the door. Jam put her hand to her ear to make sure the earbud connecting to her cell phone translator remained in place and well concealed.

  “We are looking for a criminal who killed a guard and made off with two prisoners,” the taller one bellowed. He stared around the room. “Have any of you seen any strangers, yesterday or today?”

  One of the sullen men muttered back, in a voice meant to be heard. “Funny, that’s not how I heard it. I heard some woman prisoner got into a fight with the guard trying to molest her, killed him, and took off with her daughter. The guard must have been a pansy.”

  A low murmur of uncomfortable laughter spread around the room.

  The shorter man spoke. “As usual, most of the truth has been lost in the retelling.” He glanced up at his boss and grimaced. “Though there is reason to suspect the assailant was a woman, not a man.”

  The boss raised his hand as if to smack his subordinate but restrained himself. “The great detective here thinks he is the Sherlock Holmes of Siberia. I knew Alexei well. No woman could take him. Certainly not like that.”

  The shorter man did not relent. “The tracks leading in this direction looked like a smaller person’s footprints. And we picked a swatch of cloth from a tree that might have belonged to a scarf.” His roving eyes found Jam and focused her. “A scarf that looks a great deal like your scarf.” He walked over to her table to inspect her more closely. “And who are you? When did you arrive here?”

  Jam closed her eyes for a moment, working up a sense of fear adequate to cause her hands to shake for the soldier. Now she would have to kill both of these men from the gulag, and she’d have to kill any other guards outside. She really didn’t want to kill these perfectly fine villagers, but did she have a choice?

  Of course she had a choice. Of course she would not kill them. Of course they would have to betray her when more guards showed up.

  Well, at least she could make some good miles with one of their trucks and all of the corpses in the back.

  The woman who had served her thumped up next to him. “You’ve been following the wrong footsteps. This is my niece. She, unfortunately, did not kill the guard who molested her. Toma here hasn’t spoken since. She often wanders in the woods.” She waved her hands towards the door. “There is no one here for you. This is not the woman you are looking for. Move along.”

  The boss growled. “Good advice. Like I said, we’re looking for a man.” He barked at his subordinate, who reluctantly followed him away.

  Th
e quiet in the restaurant remained deafening until they heard the trucks fire up and rumble away. The sullen young man who’d told the rumor of the escape slapped his knee. “That was great, Dinara. ‘This is not the woman you are looking for.’ Ha! Straight from the classics!” He raised a glass in Dinara’s direction. “To your health!”

  Jam noticed that she did not have a glass to raise, and there was little to gain from being quiet anymore; quite the opposite in fact. “Dinara, please bring me a vodka. Please bring everyone a vodka, on me!”

  At this, everyone raised a glass to Jam’s health.

  The once-sullen, now-laughing fellow pointed at her. “Is it true? Did you kill the famous Alexei?” He scowled. “That pig from the Spetsnaz?”

  “He was holding a gun to the head of a little girl,” Jam answered. “I was lucky.”

  Someone shouted, “To your luck!” That started another round of toasting.

  Jam finished her vodka and laid a large wad of cash on the table. “Thank you, Dinara and everyone, so much for your help. I can never repay you. But I should leave now. They’ll be back in the morning.”

  Dinara put her hands on her hips. “You should stay the night.”

  Jam shook her head. “Thank you, but I have already brought you enough danger.” She hesitated, then asked Dinara for a pen. She wrote a phone number on the napkin. “If you wind up in serious trouble, call this number. Tell them Jam asked that they help you.”

  Dinara looked at the number, puzzled. “Where does this go?”

  “It goes to a person on the BrainTrust.” Jam hoped to be alive and in the right place to see Colin’s face when he received that phone call.

  One more salute followed. “To the BrainTrust!” Apparently, even here in Siberia they knew of Jam’s home. It made her heart feel a little warmer, a little fuller.

  Jam snuck out as another round of drinks made its way through the room.

  She had gone less than a kilometer when a whooshing sound rolled overhead, and a spotlight lit her up like a helpless deer. She held up her hand against the glare. Great. Now she’d have to break out of a gulag. Or, more probably, wait for Ping to break her out. Or wind up in the cemetery in a few hours.