17 September 2030: Cincinnati, Ohio
Daniel Stedman bent over the keyboard, fingers flying. Light from a single unshaded bulb dangling from the ceiling kept a makeshift desk lit, turned the bare brick room around him into a tapestry of shadows and red-brown highlights. The space suited his mood, suited even better the job he'd taken on.
He'd gone dark months earlier, knowing just how dangerous a job that was, for himself and anyone that could be traced to him. The occasional hack-for-hire paid his few expenses; the rest of his time and all his passion went into what he'd ended up naming The Project.
All in all, what had surprised him most was how easy it had been to get this far. Figuring out who to target was the hardest part, and his grandfather's papers told him most of what he needed to know in advance. Once he'd finished sorting through those, he had a list of names, and checked those against the rumors and data thefts that filled the Undernet until the pieces started to make sense. The Gurney administration had a lot of enemies and no shortage of leaks, and that gave The Project plenty to work with.
It was more than that, though. There was new hackware available, if you knew where to look and who to ask: the kind of thing only spooks were supposed to have, really high-powered programs that could shred even top-end security systems and grab data without leaving a track. One set of rumors on the Undernet had it that the new hackware had been lifted from the US embassy in Nairobi during the war, another set of rumors denied it. Daniel didn't care where the software came from, or whose muddy fingerprints might be on it. What mattered was that the programs let him slip past firewalls, paralyze security programs, and get closer and closer to his target, until…
Now.
The trojan loaded itself into a computer in a condo in Alexandria, Virginia, burrowed its way into the operating system, then quietly copied every file on the computer and downloaded them to the Undernet. It would stay on the computer no matter what—you could reformat the hard drive and the trojan would protect itself, keep on working, and evade detection. Hookware, they called it, like a hook for a fish.
You don't know me, Daniel thought. You probably didn't even bother to find out if the man you killed had kids or grandkids. You probably don't think it matters.
By the time you find out otherwise, Ellen baby, it's going to be way too late.
17 September 2030: One Observatory Circle, Washington DC
“I'm starting to wonder if this country has lost its mind,” Bridgeport said.
Joe Egmont shook his head once, sharply. “No. It's rational enough, if you look at it from their point of view. Why do the American people put up with the perpetual clown show here in Washington? Because we win wars and keep the economy more or less running. We haven't had much luck doing either of those lately, in case you haven't noticed.”
“So they want to fire us.”
“Basically, yeah.”
For the past two days, Resolution 58 had been all over the media. Most reporters had pitched it as one more silly season story, but people hadn't taken it that way. Comments pages were flooded by posts supporting dissolution, and the online forum the constitutional convention had set up for public discussion had crashed three times, flooded with posts about dissolving the Union. Public meetings and rallies were being called, some opposing dissolution but many more in favor of it.
“The problem is,” Egmont went on, “that the United States hasn't actually been one country for a very long time. I don't know if it ever was one country, really. Look at New England and Texas, or Oregon and Alabama: other than the fact that they speak the same language—”
“More or less,” Bridgeport said drily.
“Granted. Other than that, though, how much do they have in common? Not much. The only real bond is that they've all got the same national government, and since 1865, nobody thought that was going to change any time soon.”
“And now they've changed their minds.”
“A lot of people, yes. They're looking at dissolution and they're not just thinking, hey, let's get rid of those idiots in Washington—though that's part of it, and Gurney isn't helping things with this military spending thing of his. They're also thinking, hey, let's get rid of those idiots in that other part of the country that won't let us have the laws we want. And then there are the western states.”
“The federal lands issue?”
“Bingo. They're looking at all the land the federal government owns west of the Mississippi, which don't pay any state taxes at all, and rubbing their hands together. There are quite a few states that could balance their budgets overnight if they could slap property taxes on what's now federal land, and don't even talk about what they could get by selling or leasing them. So everyone thinks they can get something out of it.”
“And they don't think about what they're going to lose.”
Egmont leaned forward. “Seriously? They've already lost most of it. This country is a basket case right now, and I don't see Gurney or Congress doing anything to change that any time soon. The arguments for dissolution are actually pretty solid, all things considered.”
Bridgeport looked past him, out the window at the green lawn surrounding the vice president's mansion. A flagpole stood out in front, with Old Glory hanging limp in the still air of late summer. “There are less pragmatic issues,” he said.
“Yeah, but you know how politics goes. ‘What has the United States done for me lately?’ These days, for a lot of people, not very much.”
18 September 2030: St. Louis, Missouri
By midafternoon, word was spreading among the reporters and camera crews hovering around the convention center that there would be a demonstration that evening, a big one. As soon as he found out about it, McGaffney stepped out into the hallway, hunted up the route of the march online, and then started calling restaurants along it until he found one that could promise him a window seat overlooking the street. That done, he walked back into the media room.
“Any word yet?” he asked the woman from the BBC.
“Sweet bugger all,” she replied, without looking up from the screen of her tablet. “The antis are still busy throwing every spanner they can find into the works.”
“Typical Americans,” the Russian from Novosti said, with a dry little chuckle. “They will spend the next week trying to avoid making a decision, and then the next six weeks blaming each other for making it.”
“Too right,” McGaffney said. Then, to the woman from the BBC: “Free this evening? I've got a dinner reservation with a window seat on the march route.”
She glanced up, smiled. “Sorry, I'm already booked.”
McGaffney grinned. “Thought it was worth the try.”
He glanced up at the clock, turned toward the door, and blinked as a familiar figure came through it. “Hafiz!” he called out, crossing the room. “When did you get this side of the pond?”
“Just now,” the al-Jazeera stringer replied. “Hello, Tommy.” He greeted half the others in the press room by name, then glanced around. “What have I missed?”
“As I was telling McGaffney a moment ago,” said the woman from the BBC, “sweet bugger all. It's all parliamentary maneuvering and backroom deals at this point.”
“Any idea what chance the amendment has?”
“No one seems to know,” said the Novosti reporter.
“No one at the convention,” McGaffney said. “Out there?” He gestured up and back with his head, suggesting the rest of the country. “If they have anything to say about it, it's got a good fighting chance.”
Hafiz considered that. “Can you fill me in?”
“I was heading for grub,” McGaffney said.
“I'll buy,” Hafiz responded.
“You're on.”
They got a taxi from the convention center to the restaurant. “Got a call two nights ago from my bosses in Doha,” Hafiz said as the taxi weaved through rush hour traffic. “They'd just heard about the dissolution proposal, and they wanted me to drop what I was d
oing and get here to cover it.”
McGaffney gave him a startled look. “They must have dozens of people here already.”
“True. They don't have anybody used to war zones.”
“They said that?”
“In so many words.”
McGaffney let out a low whistle.
The restaurant was crowded, but the hostess led them to a table right up against a big plate glass window, with a good view down the street. They ordered drinks—a beer for McGaffney, a cup of tea for Hafiz—and meals, as the sun sank into a cloud bank in the west and the first lights came on in the street below. After a good slug of the beer, McGaffney tried to explain what he'd seen in the months he'd spent in America: the sinking economy and the rising anger, the powder keg feel of a nation primed to explode.
“You've seen plenty of insurgencies,” Hafiz asked him. “How close are we?”
McGaffney thought about that for a while. “That's a hard call,” he said finally. “A lot of people lost whatever faith they had in the system they've got, and I get the sense a lot of people haven't had much faith in it for a good long time. The thing is, it'll take a spark to set them off, and I couldn't tell you when or where that's going to come. It could be here and now, or months from now on the other side of the country.”
“Months? Not, for example, years?”
“If it takes years, I'll be gobsmacked. I—”
He stopped in midsentence. Hafiz read his face and turned in the chair to follow his gaze.
Down the street, filling it from sidewalk to sidewalk, came a river of marching forms. The front rank carried a printed banner with two words on it: DISSOLUTION YES. Torches blazed further back like stars, scores or hundreds of them, whipping and flaring in a wind neither of the reporters could feel. Signs and placards denouncing Gurney, Congress, and the opponents of dissolution in the convention caught the firelight, and so did faces, passionate and intense, their mouths moving in unison. A low rhythmic murmur came through the windows: the crowd was chanting something, and McGaffney thought he could guess roughly what it was.
Conversations in the restaurant dropped away to nothing, and dozens of people came over to the windows, watching the march. The front rank passed under the restaurant windows and kept going toward the convention center until it could no longer be seen. Minutes passed, the march flowed on, and the end of it was nowhere in sight.
“Fifty thousand so far?” McGaffney asked after their food arrived.
“At least.” Hafiz watched the marchers, the waving placards and shouting faces, then turned back to McGaffney. “Do you recall when we had lunch in Dar es Salaam, right after the war, and you said you thought the next war would be here? I thought you'd ended up with a screw loose somewhere.” He speared a piece of chicken with his fork. “I was quite wrong. These people are ready to go to war.”
21 September 2030: St. Louis, Missouri
“Mr. Chairman, I move to close debate.”
“Second.”
“It's been moved and seconded to close debate on Resolution 58.” The chairman's face was hard and expressionless as stone. “Vote yes or no.”
Harriet Elkerson tapped the green button on her voting tablet. The total appeared a moment later on the screen: 261 yes, 174 no.
“Mr. Chairman, I move that this body adopt Resolution 58 and submit it to the several states as an amendment to the United States Constitution.”
“Second.”
“It's been moved and seconded to adopt Resolution 58 and submit it to the states,” the chairman said. “Vote yes or no.”
Elkerson voted again, pressing the green button. The total this time was 239 yes, 196 no.
As the hubbub died down, one of the state politicians who'd tried to push through the original plan stood, ashen-faced. “Mr. Chairman,” he said, “I move reconsideration of Resolution 1. If we're going to do without the United States, it doesn't exactly make much sense to raise a fuss about unfunded mandates.”
Someone seconded the motion. The chairman called for debate, but no one responded, and the vote was called. By 266 to 169, the proposed amendment banning unfunded mandates was voted down.
“Mr. Chairman,” someone else called out, “I move that this body adjourn sine die.”
“Second.”
Elkerson tapped the voting tablet one last time, and by 304 to 131, the constitutional convention closed.
The moment the final gavel came down, the floor erupted in shouting and angry words, and two delegates got into a shoving match in the aisle not far away from where Elkerson was sitting. Still, the thing was done. What would be, if it passed, the 28th and last amendment to the US Constitution was on its way to the final test of ratification.
TWENTY-SIX
23 September 2030: Spokane, Washington
The plaza in Riverfront Park was packed with people by the time the sound tech finished setting up the PA system. “Here you go,” he said, handing a microphone up to the woman on the podium. “You're live.”
“I want to thank you all for coming today,” Harriet Elkerson said into the mike, and the words boomed out across the plaza and over the Spokane River to the other shore. “I know a lot of you have questions about what happened at the constitutional convention; a lot of you have questions about the amendment we passed and sent to the states. I want to explain why I proposed it and voted for it—why so many of us voted for it—and why I think it's the best choice we've got.”
Murmurs moved through the crowd as she paused. “Most of us know what it's like to be in a relationship that just doesn't work any more,” she went on. “No matter how hard you try, no matter what anyone says or does, you're not a couple any more, and the only thing you can do is accept that, make a clean break, and move on. That's what's happened to the United States. We're not a country any more; we haven't been a country for years now. We're a bunch of different countries with different values and ways of doing things, and the only thing that holds us together is habit. The amendment is the divorce that sets us free to go our own ways.
“Gurney's flacks are saying that we can't split the United States into fifty countries. Nobody's suggesting that. Once the states are free to make other arrangements for their future, they'll sort themselves out into six or eight or ten nations that make sense. New England's a country. The South is a country. Texas—we'll let them figure that out for themselves.” That got a laugh, and she paused to let it die down. “Washington and Oregon; maybe Idaho; maybe Montana too—that'll be up to the people of each state. Up to you and me.
“Is it going to be easy? Of course not. Being part of the United States hasn't been easy, either. The important thing is that we'll be able to choose our own future and make our own decisions, without having to run them past people on the other side of the continent who don't understand our issues or share our values, without having everything we want blocked by that pack of idiots in Washington DC. I think that's worth a little extra trouble.”
She paused to drink from a bottle of water on the podium. Someone in the crowd called out to her, “If Gurney gets his way, it's gonna be more than a little trouble.”
Elkerson put down the bottle. “I know,” she said, “and we're going to have to be ready to deal with that. I don't think he's clueless enough to try to tell the people that they can't exercise their constitutional rights, but we have to be prepared for that—one way or another.”
25 September 2030: The White House, Washington DC
“They can do it,” said Janice Kumigawa, the president's legal adviser. “That's just the problem. Everything the convention did is legal according to the Constitution, and if the state conventions vote to ratify, the amendment takes effect and that's all there is to it.”
“What about the Supreme Court?” Gurney demanded.
“They don't have a say in it. Neither does Congress, and neither do you. I'm sorry, sir, but it really is that simple.”
The picture of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback loomed up behind Gu
rney; Ellen Harbin tried not to think about the contrast. She, Gurney, and Kumigawa were the only people present in the room. That was one too many for what Harbin had in mind, but she was prepared to wait.
“The president,” she said, “needs a legal justification for having a say.”
Kumigawa glanced at Gurney, and when he nodded, turned to face Harbin. “That won't be easy—not if it has to stand up to legal challenge.”
“Find something,” Harbin told her. “It doesn't have to be ironclad; it just has to be plausible.”
“You're asking for a fig leaf.”
“Essentially.”
“I can probably manage that.” She pushed her chair back. “Is there anything else?”
Gurney looked at Harbin, then shook his head. “No, that's it. Thanks, Jan.”
“Sure.” She got up and left the room, closing the door behind her.
Once she was gone, Gurney turned his chair to face Harbin. “Do you think we can make it stick?”
“I'm sure of it,” she told him. “The agitators who are pushing this nonsense have momentum on their side right now, but that's all they've got. Once they find out that you're not going to sit on your hands and let the country go down the drain, this dissolution fad will pop like a bubble, and people will come back to their senses.”
“If they try it again—”
“They can't be allowed to try it again. It's long past time to make some significant changes to the way this country is governed, and this gives you the opportunity to make those.”
He swallowed visibly. “One thing I want to see changed—this stupid every-four-years election business.”
“Exactly.” She allowed a bright smile. “That and other things.”
She got up, walked over to the painting of Roosevelt, knowing that Gurney would follow. “This is the twenty-first century,” she said. “We don't wear powdered wigs or ride in carriages any more; There's no reason why we should still be saddled with an eighteenth-century system of government. Especially when all it takes is someone strong enough to take charge and make the changes that have to be made.”
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