“Oh, they know what the score is. At this point I'm not sure it's just the unfunded mandate thing. They've been served crow by this town for years, and told to eat it up and smile. Now they're looking for payback. If they do get their convention, we'll be lucky if all they do is pass something against unfunded mandates and go home.”
“I know.” South Dakota had just become the fourth state to pass a resolution in favor of a constitutional convention. So far, all the states that had joined Arkansas were minor players in national politics, but word was that legislators in three of the big states—Texas, Colorado and Pennsylvania—were drafting resolutions along the same lines. If one or more of them joined in, it would be a whole new game.
“Tell me this,” Bridgeport said then. “You know Congress better than anybody else in this town. Do you think I've got any chance of getting them to come to their senses soon enough to head this thing off?”
“I wish,” Price told him. “You've been around here long enough, you know how many of these folks have forgotten there's a world outside the Beltway. It's going to take some really big shock to remind them—and if this is the shock, there won't be a blessed thing they can do about it once it happens.” She gestured with her sandwich. “Until then, it'll be too little, too late.”
6 April 2030: The White House, Washington DC
Ellen Harbin closed the door behind her, sat down at the desk, picked up the phone, punched a number. “Mr. Pohjola? I have a job for you.”
“Of course, Ms. Harbin.” The man's voice was all but expressionless. “What can I do for you?”
“We talked earlier about William Stedman.”
“Of course.”
“He's refused to be reasonable.”
“What would you like done, Ms. Harbin?”
“The president has authorized executive action.”
“Of course,” Pohjola repeated. He said it as calmly as though she'd asked him to pick up takeout Burmese for the office. “Is there a time frame?”
“As soon as convenient.”
“Not a problem. I'll take care of it.”
“Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Pohjola.”
“And likewise.” The connection closed.
Harbin put down the phone. She hated to admit it, but Emil Pohjola frightened her. An operative in what was euphemistically termed the Executive Special Projects Staff, the team of off-book employees every presidential administration had on hand for those actions that were as necessary as they were extralegal, he had never been anything but scrupulously polite to her. Still, she knew with absolute clarity that if Gurney decided that she had to die, Pohjola would have her killed without a second thought or the least trace of feeling, and there would be only the thinnest chance that she could do anything about it.
She tapped her computer trackball irritably, waking the screen. The news feed had nothing new—the Iranians had just launched a major offensive in Kurdistan against the Turks, the dollar was wobbling just above four to the euro, and the New Mexico legislature had just voted in favor of a convention. She minimized the news feed, opened the latest report from NSA.
At that moment, miles away in one of the capital's Virginia suburbs, Emil Pohjola picked up a phone and dialed.
6 April 2030: Camden, New Jersey
Since the Second World War, every presidential administration had some relationship to the quintessentially American institution of organized crime, and since a certain November day in 1963, every presidential administration had taken pains to keep the relationship suitably cordial. There were limits to that cordiality—Mafia families that ran afoul of the ordinary workings of law enforcement could expect no help from the White House—but the syndicate could be confident that nobody at the top end of the executive branch would ever again try to make political hay by crusading against the mob. It was a functional arrangement, and it made room for favors to be asked and granted from time to time.
Thus Mike Capoblanco was far from surprised when he got a call from a White House staff member that afternoon. “Mr. Pohjola. A pleasure as always. What can I do for you?” A moment later: “Of course. We'd be happy to oblige.”
He reached for one of the lined yellow legal pads he habitually used for notes, got a pen, noted down the details. “How soon?” He listened, then said, “Not a problem. I'll get my people on it right away. Give my best to your boss.”
He hung up, then picked up the phone again and dialed a different number. “Joey? I need you up here as soon as you can make it. Yeah, it's a job.” He paused, listening. “Yeah, that'll be fine. See you then.”
8 April 2030: Arlington, Virginia
They looked like any of the other joggers out that cold April morning: two men in nondescript running gear pounding through a city park, packs on their backs and breath puffing out in front of their faces in little clouds. For all anyone else could see, it was sheer accident that they stayed in sight of a third jogger, a middle-aged man dressed much the same way, who was maybe a dozen yards ahead of them. It was only when they got to the only section of the trail out of sight of streets and houses that they sped up. Even then it looked casual until the two men caught up with the third.
The scuffle ended quickly as the lone jogger went limp, a chemical-soaked cloth pressed over his mouth and nose. The others hauled him off the trail, down to a park bench in a little hollow, where the third member of the team was waiting. No one spoke. They put the jogger on the bench, and one of the men held him propped up. The third member of the team, who had rubber gloves on his hands, pulled a cheap unlicensed pistol from his coat pocket, pressed it to the jogger's head, and fired. The other let the corpse fall, and the third man carefully slid the gun into its right hand, finger on the trigger.
They left at once, the two joggers back to the trail, the third man out of the park by a different route. When he got back to his car, he pulled off the gloves and put them in a plastic grocery sack, along with his coat; those and every other scrap of clothing on him would be in an incinerator within three hours. He pulled out a cell phone and speed dialed.
“Pete? It's Joey. We're finished on this end. You can go ahead with the rest of it.”
Two miles away, in a silent apartment, two more men went to work. They had already found the target's computer, hooked it up to a laptop and cracked the security; now a document went into it, electronically backdated to look as though it had been written the night before. One of the men got the printer running, waited while a copy of the document printed, and took it over to the table by the couch; the other copied everything on the computer, then removed all electronic traces of his presence and disconnected the laptop. A few minutes later they were out the door, and a few minutes after that they had left the building: two ordinary-looking men in business-casual clothes, chatting to each other as they walked to their cars.
One of them pulled out his cell phone and speed dialed. “Joey? It's Pete. Everything's taken care of. You want to let Mike know? Great. See you.”
It was almost four hours before another pair of joggers, looking for a quiet spot to eat their lunches, found Bill Stedman's body and called the police. Another hour passed before the police opened his apartment and found the suicide note. By then Joey and the members of his team were back home in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, with a long list of people ready to swear that they'd been at work all morning. All in all, it was a very professional job.
8 April 2030: Silver Spring, Maryland
The TV above the bar was yammering something about the Stedman suicide—what, McGaffney didn't know, because the sound was off and the talking heads on the local news channel might as well have been mouthing empty air. It didn't greatly matter, since the same handful of facts and barrelful of rumors had been swirling through Washington since the news broke just after lunchtime.
He walked up to the bar, and glanced around at the clientele while the bartender finished mixing something for another customer. It was a quiet, upscale place, not the sort McGaffney u
sually frequented, full of professional types in business-casual clothes; he'd come there only because it was close to his hotel and he'd had a long day.
He spotted the woman just before the bartender came over. After bantering with the man and getting a scotch on ice, he walked over to the booth where she sat, nursing a mostly empty glass. “Don't mean to be rude,” he said, “but weren't you in the camp at Shinyanga, right after the war?”
She looked up from her drink. “Yes, I was.” Then, placing him: “You're the Australian journalist—I've forgotten your name.”
“Tommy McGaffney. No trouble—I'll have to check my notes for yours. Are you up for a second interview? I'd be glad to stand you a drink.”
That earned him a smile. “You're on. It's Melanie Bridgeport, by the way.”
McGaffney flagged down a waiter with a motion of his head, indicated Melanie's glass, pulled his tablet out of his bag and got the file open. “Melanie Bridgeport, colonel, US Air Force. So what's it been like, coming back to the States after the war?”
While she answered—it was pretty much the usual thing, the long awkward journey back to something like a normal life that soldiers had been having to make since wars were invented in the first place—McGaffney watched her. A looker, he'd decided that back at the POW camp, and there was someone home behind the pretty face, too. Her drink arrived; he asked more questions, recorded the answers, took notes in case the sound files got scuppered. When the drink was mostly gone, he asked, “Can I get you another?”
That got him a quick amused look. “Is it that good an interview?”
“Nah, an interview gets one. Anything more than that is personal.”
She considered that, and him. “Please.”
9 April 2030: Austin, Texas
“What's your take on it?” asked Terry McCracken.
The circle of faces around the table in the state house conference room all but summed up Texas politics, or for that matter Texas as a whole: good ol’ boys from the east Texas oil country, lean-faced cattlemen from the north and west, new-money types from the tech corridor between Austin and San Antonio—the Silicon Rangeland, wags called it these days—and tough Hispanic politicians whose great-grandparents had been field laborers and whose great-grandkids would probably own the state outright. They were the state senators and representatives that mattered, the movers and shakers from both parties, and in the next few minutes they would decide whether the proposal made by Arkansas and endorsed by nine other states would become a footnote in American history or something potentially much, much bigger.
“I'm in favor of it,” said Maria del Campo Ruiz, the speaker of the Texas House. “Those idiots in Washington will just keep on making a mess of things unless someone reins them in good and hard. This might just do that.”
“Maybe so,” drawled Tom Pettigrew, the majority whip from the Senate. “But only if we can make it stick. You seen the polls? They ain't exactly in our favor.”
“Canned polls,” del Campo said, with a contemptuous toss of her head. “Bought and paid for by Gurney, or by Congress.”
“For what it's worth,” McCracken interjected, “the media polls put Texas three to two against a convention, and the polls I've had my people run are five to two in favor.”
“That's about what I'm hearing,” said Phil Briscoe, the Senate minority leader.
McCracken glanced across the table at him. Briscoe wanted his job, everybody in Austin right on down to the call girls and janitors knew that, and getting support from him was an unfamiliar experience. “What do you think, Phil?” he asked.
“I agree with Maria,” Briscoe said. “Those bastards need their leash yanked hard. Even if it doesn't go all the way to a convention, this has got them running scared, and if it does—if we can get unfunded mandates flushed down the crapper once and for all—that's gonna make life a lot easier for us. For all the states, really.”
McCracken nodded. “Anyone disagree?”
“Not enough to fight about it,” Pettigrew said.
No one else spoke. “You pass it,” McCracken said, “I'll sign it. I want to see the look on the face of that sad little runt Kamanoff when he gets the news.”
10 April 2030: Nashville, Tennessee
I am going to fuck with you, Daniel Stedman repeated to himself. I am going to fuck with you like nobody's ever been fucked with before.
He sat down at the computer terminal in the little suburban library, entered a stolen login and password—he'd hacked the system most of five years ago, an easy job for him even then—and then hit the override codes that jammed the government snooper programs. He'd chosen a terminal where nobody else could see the screen, which was good; as soon as the override codes took effect, he was in the guts of the system, opening a piece of hackware that gave him access to the Undernet.
Whoever you are, he thought, whatever made you think you could get away with killing Grandpa, I am so going to fuck you over.
The thumb drive his grandfather had given him went into one of the USB ports, and he accessed the files, got them uploaded to the nearest Undernet server, labeled them with one-use-only forwarding codes, and sent them out of the country to servers the NSA and the Office of Internet Security couldn't close down. From there, the files propagated themselves across the planet, zigzagging from one network to another, leaving no traces behind.
He uploaded the files to a second Undernet server, gave them different forwarding codes, sent them on their way. That done, he closed the hackware window, opened a link to the Undernet chatroom he helped run, and tried to think of what to say.
That brought memories welling up—the phone call from Grandma Karen two days ago, his mother bursting into tears, her stammered words and then the bare bleak bones of the news story he'd gotten off the internet a few minutes later, pushing at the limits of his self-control. Behind those were other memories, Grandpa Bill flying out for birthdays and Christmas, walks in the woods, visits to Washington, echoes of a life that some jerk decided to snuff out.
Then, his grandfather's words: “I just want some insurance in place.”
You got it, Grandpa.
He typed in: just upped files from clean src. william stedman quote suicide unquote was murder, prob on gurney's orders. fwd fwd fwd baby.
A few dozen more keystrokes got him off the Undernet and deleted every trace of his presence on the computer except the stolen login; he used that to look up a science fiction novel, then logged out and went in among the bookshelves.
Fifteen minutes later, 200 pages of scanned documents detailing the planning and execution of Operation Blazing Torch hit the legal internet via a site in Finland. Heading the paper was a brief typewritten note by Bill Stedman. Its first sentence went:
If you are reading this, I have been murdered.
In well under twenty-four hours, that sentence was all over the planet.
TWENTY-FOUR
13 April 2030: The White House, Washington DC
“Deny it,” Ellen Harbin said.
Gurney gave her a blank, frightened look. “But—”
“Deny it,” she repeated. “Tell them that it's a pack of lies. A failed, bitter man on the brink of suicide made it up in a final attempt to lash out at his personal enemies. That's the line you need to take. Anything else and the media will eat you alive.”
The president nodded, slowly, after a moment.
They were in the Oval Office, just the two of them. It usually was just the two of them at her morning conferences these days, and Harbin knew perfectly well where that was headed. The thought didn't bother her at all; it would not be the first time she'd bartered her body for political power, and if it gave her more influence in the White House, it was a bargain worth her while.
What did bother her, a little, was how easily he'd crumpled once the media circus started around Stedman's documents. She'd known for a long time that he was weak; there were plenty of people like him in Washington politics, men and women who chased the trapp
ings of power to distract themselves from their own inadequacies. Still, there were weaklings and there were weaklings. It troubled her that Gurney had folded so easily, that he might need more time and attention than she could reasonably spare if a real crisis ever erupted.
“I've got Jim and Hannah working on your speech for the press conference tonight,” she went on. That had been a risk; she didn't have any authority over Gurney's people in the Office of the President, but the speechwriters were realists and sensed the way power was shifting in the new administration. “That's the line they're taking. Give it your best, don't hesitate to get angry if anybody in the media contradicts you, and you'll do fine.”
Gurney nodded again, and the blank frightened look slid off his face. He leaned forward, took both her hands in his. “Thank you, Ellen.”
For a moment she thought he was going to start pawing her right there, but he released her hands, gave her a shaky smile. A few more words and she was out of the room, headed back to her own office downstairs in the National Security Council rooms.
She was most of the way there before she remembered that she'd meant to talk to him about the agitation around a constitutional convention. Not significant enough, she decided. Bridgeport could deal with that; she and the president had more important issues to face.
16 April 2030: The Capitol, Washington DC
“That's as much as I can give them,” Mike Kamanoff snapped.
“Mike,” said Vice President Bridgeport, “for God's sake, will you listen? They don't care. They really don't.”
Kamanoff met the outburst with a bleak look. “I know. I'm the one that has to care.”
The two of them and Nancy Liebkuhn, the majority whip, were sitting in Bridgeport's office in the Capitol. Both senators looked harried; the Senate had been deadlocked for two days over what to do to head off a constitutional convention. That morning, Alaska had become the twenty-fifth state to pass a resolution calling for a convention.
Kamanoff sagged, shook his head. “You know how many people in this goddamn club have pet programs that they want the states to pay for? I do; every one of ’em's been hammering on my office door for the last week.” He ran a hand back through what was left of his hair. “We got NAPA repealed, and that was about as easy as circumcizing dinosaurs with your teeth.”
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