by John Barnes
He called Seagull to let them know there was trouble in the city; no voice mail picked up while he let the phone ring fifty times after he started counting. The stones and bricks had stopped after that first flurry, but so far three shots had caromed off the armored glass and screamed off into the dark.
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. 151°6’E 11°23’N: ABOUT 450 NAUTICAL MILES EAST-SOUTHEAST OF GUAM, IN THE PACIFIC. THE NEAREST LAND IS GUAM. 9:10 P.M. GUAM TIME (8:10 P.M. JAYAPURA, 6:10 A.M. EST). MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
Seagull Watchdog One, the flight of three F-35s, arrived on the dot—literally, because the rendezvous point, 151°6’E 11°23’N, was just a dot on the map of the Pacific. The nearest land was Guam, which they had left about forty-five minutes ago, taking off from Andersen AFB. As agreed, they fanned out in the Touch Hands formation, a slowly rotating equilateral triangle in which each plane was at its highest cruising altitude and just close enough to the others to put them three degrees above the horizon. In Touch Hands, they maximized their chances of detecting the white, unmarked Dreamliner that they had been told was designated Seagull; the mission itself was SCI, Sensitive Compartmented Information, a designation above Top Secret.
The F-35, after a rocky start, had been thoroughly shaken down and its bugs worked out once and for all during the Second Iranian War. Its electronics suite had been redesigned and refined by the ten years of anti-terror patrol since the suicide attack on the carrier Franklin Roosevelt. The same routine anti-terror, anti-drug, and border patrols had trained the Air Force pilots to execute Touch Hands flawlessly. If the Dreamliner named Seagull was coming to its rendezvous at 151°6’E 11°23’N, Seagull Watchdog One would find it; the dark was no barrier. A typhoon would have been no more than a nuisance, but the sea was calm tonight.
With their large drop tanks, Seagull Watchdog One could circle the rendezvous point in Touch Hands for more than an hour and still have plenty of fuel to complete the escort mission before turning the Dreamliner over to fresh escorts out of Hawaii.
They had been warned that the Dreamliner might be as much as twenty minutes late; unofficially, the flight leader had been told they were coming out of some bush-league Third World airport to the south and west, the kind of place where delays were routine and anything could happen. When they picked up a plane on radar, they were to hail it via secure transponder code; once they had positive ID, they would close in to fly a protective formation around the Dreamliner. Until contact, or unless there were problems, they were to minimize radio contact with the controllers back at Andersen.
At twenty minutes after arrival, the flight leader radioed in that there had been no trace, and called for a radar and satellite confirmation that they were in the right place. They were. Twenty minutes later he requested and received permission to try to raise the transponder buoy that Seagull would have released if it had gone down. There was nothing. At about 10:35 P.M., with safety margins for completing the mission running thin, they were relieved by another flight, Seagull Watchdog Two, and headed back to base.
They went in for immediate debriefing by more high-ranking officers than any of them had ever seen in the same room, but they had nothing to report except that they had flown out to the rendezvous point, waited, and encountered nothing.
“Was there anything that could have been a trace of Air Force Two?” a man in a civilian suit asked, and only then did they know what their mission had been and what was lost.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON, DC. 6:54 A.M. EST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
In Washington, DC, wherever great hordes of Federal workers pour in and out of big, blocky office buildings all day long, there are more small coffee shops, cafés, and grills per block than in any artists’ quarter or bohemian enclave anywhere. They are nearly as essential to government operations as the Pentagon, the White House, or the Executive Office Building.
People in private industry hold meetings to coordinate what people are doing, decide issues in which several people have a say, and gratify some boss’s ego, not necessarily in that order. Only the third purpose is the same in Washington.
Decades of sunshine laws and open-government policies guarantee that anything discussed at any official meeting is eventually going to be public, so the most important rule for any meeting is to have nothing said that might ever attract any attention. Rather than coordinating or deciding, official government meetings ratify pre-made decisions and avoid ever saying anything unexpected.
To achieve such perfect official meetings, there has to be a “meeting before the meeting,” where the people involved caucus about what is going to be said. Disclosure laws and media scrutiny force any bureaucrats who need to think freely to do it in a place and time that is not official in any way—and thus those coffee shops and hole-in-the-wall cafés are vital.
Heather O’Grainne knew all that as well as birds know breezes; as she rounded the corner, finishing her morning run around the Capitol area, it compressed to time for the meeting that can’t be a meeting. This year marked a milestone: At age thirty-nine, she had now been a desk bureaucrat for eight years, one more than she had been an active Fed cop in her younger days. It tasted sour that she knew these bureaucratic games better, now, than she knew current procedure for arresting a suspect or obtaining a warrant.
This was bound to be a big, messy, uncomfortable meeting-before-the-meeting. As Chief of Staff, Allison Sok Banh was one of the few people in the Department of the Future who could make Heather jump on command. She had “invited” Heather to an “early breakfast” to “talk things over” at the Angkor Coffee Shop, which happened to be owned by Allie’s Uncle Sam, and had a convenient back eating area that wasn’t open during the mornings. Translated from bureaucratese, Allie had summoned Heather to an urgent emergency meeting, and whatever was up, Allie really didn’t want it to leak.
Sam, in his seventies, stooped, face deeply lined, had to be a foot and a half shorter than Heather’s six feet. He greeted her with a bow and a grin. “You’re here to assess my cooking?”
“Only if it’s a threat.” It was their inside joke, ever since Allie had explained that Heather headed up the Office of Future Threat Assessment.
“Allison is already here, in back. Your usual order?”
“Yes, Sam, thanks.”
The food here is so good I even eat here when we’re not skulking around on some piece of intrigue and politics, Heather thought. I guess that enhances the cover for days like today. The thought seemed slightly paranoid, but Remember, paranoia is one of the leading signs of having secret, all-powerful enemies.
She found Allie at the sunny table by the window; the curtains were drawn. Arnie Yang was with her, and that was more bad news. First of all, Arnie was Heather’s senior analyst in OFTA’s communications-monitoring program, and Heather should have been the one to bring him if he were needed. But coincidentally, he was also Allie’s boyfriend, and maybe her spy. And worse yet, his area of investigation was the last thing Heather wanted to talk about.
Allie and Arnie were eating already. Heather had barely sat down when Sam served her a Cambodian Breakfast Number One—chili-flavored pork, rice, and pickles, plus a big mug of chicory coffee with condensed milk. He vanished, carefully closing the door before Heather quite finished saying “Thank you,” and in the outer, public room, the music was abruptly much louder.
Heather relished her first swallow of the sweet, thick coffee. “You’re gonna make me fat with these meetings here.”
Arnie smirked. “I know you’re mostly muscle, boss. Bet your dad had to buy a tractor when you left the potato farm.”
“Do they farm potatoes with tractors? I’m an LA city chickie.” She sipped again at the rich brown coffee and then dug into the pork and rice; once Allie started into business, Heather knew from past experience, there wouldn’t be much time to eat.
When they had all finished wolfing down the food, Allie put her iScribe on the table.
“You’re recording this?” Heather said, s
hocked.
“Thought I’d better. CYA for all of us.”
“So, as soon as I saw you here, Arnie, I knew it had to be about Daybreak.”
“Heather,” Arnie said, “I haven’t said one word to Allie about—”
“You don’t have a leak in your organization,” Allie said, smoothly, heading off accusations and arguments. “But we do need to do something, soon. This comes down from Secretary Weisbrod, Heather, he says we’ve got to crack this open and let everyone else into the playpen.”
“Damn,” Heather said. Hunh, Secretary Weisbrod, not “Graham,” like Allie and I always call him. A little reminder that he’s the boss. Better give up before I get stomped. “I just hadn’t wanted to share it around the department because it sounds so crazy—”
“Too crazy for DoF? That’s got to be crazy.”
Heather returned the lopsided smile. The Department of the Future had a rep for madness; it had come into existence because Roger Pendano, who was about to be re-elected president, had once been a student of Graham Weisbrod, and some people—Heather and Allie were two—just never recovered from that experience, remaining “Weisbrodites” for decades no matter what else they did. As America’s most public futurologist, Weisbrod had made his slogan, We can’t afford just any old future, the title of a best-selling book, and now national policy.
DoF was the smallest, newest, and least significant department, but with Weisbrod at the helm, the Department of the Future had bombarded the public, the media, the Congress, and every government department with an endless stream of reports, studies, and scenarios. When a columnist at NYTBlog described them as “useful, sometimes necessary, lunatics,” Weisbrod threatened to make that the Department motto.
“Yeah, I think it’s crazy even for us,” Heather said.
Allie said, “You’ve been stalling on reporting this out of your office for months, Heather. Are you just afraid you’ll sound like Chicken Little?”
“Kind of. Look, every time I’ve ever made the news, it was because something blew up or went south. Daybreak might be nothing, and then I’ll look like a fool. It’s sort of like an asteroid strike; so highly unlikely that it seems irresponsible to waste time talking about it, but… but it could be so serious that… has Arnie told you anything?”
“Nothing,” Arnie said, flatly, obviously annoyed. “I said that already. I don’t game you behind your back, boss.”
Heather looked into his eyes and nodded; his lips tensed, barely acknowledging that they understood each other.
Allie had been watching them as if she expected one of them to pull a knife. “It’s not a security breach, Heather,” she said. “As far as we can know, Daybreak is still dark, tight, and close in your office. It’s just that you’ve been watching this for months, it hasn’t gone away, it keeps getting scarier, and it’s time to involve the rest of the government, that’s all. I haven’t gotten a word out of Arnie on the subject.”
If there’s a subject you can’t get a word out of Arnie about, Heather thought, that would be a first. But she said, “Well, maybe he should give you some words. It’s been his research baby.”
Allie said, “However you want to do it. But the Secretary wants us to roll this out, first to the other branches of the Department of the Future, then immediately to other Federal agencies. He’s assuming full responsibility if it turns out we’re crying wolf. Now, lay it out. In two hours we’re meeting with Browder and Crittenden—”
“Christ, Allie, they’ll tear us apart!”
“Not with me sitting in the room and Graham nodding along with you—and especially not if you practice first. Now tell me about Daybreak, just as if I didn’t know anything at all. What it is and why it’s important. And then after we rehearse you, we rehearse Arnie, because when you bring him in, your two asshat colleagues will be ten times as hard on him.”
Heather drew a deep breath and began an impromptu revision of the speech she’d been making to her bathroom mirror three or four times a day for many weeks:
“Daybreak looks sort of like the formation of an international terrorist movement, sort of like a philosophic discussion, sort of like an artists’ movement, sort of like a college fad, and sort of like a shared-world online game. It’s a complex of closely related ideas that strongly attract maybe five million people worldwide, with a hard core of about a hundred thousand, of which maybe thirty thousand are in this country. Daybreak people identify with Daybreak the way communists identify with the Revolution, funjadelicals identify with the Rapture, or technogeeks identify with the Singularity. But Daybreak seems to involve many thousands of people doing widespread sabotage and wrecking all at once—it could change overnight to self-organizing, spontaneous, widespread terrorism, maybe.”
She could see Allie was trying not to make it a reprimand. “That’s supposed to be your office’s job—to look for long-range implausible threats and alert other Federal—”
“But DoF has been burned so often about—”
“OFTA’s job is to cry wolf,” Allie said, very firmly. “Whenever you think you might see one. It’s in the hands of others to see whether there’s a real wolf or not. So is that the wolf? Thirty thousand Americans might start wrecking stuff at random?”
Heather glanced at Arnie Yang and said, “Okay, giving you fair coverage, you’ve been saying for a month that it’s time to tell her how bad it could be.”
To her surprise, Arnie was nodding, not popping up with some version of Told you so or Well, duh. He said to Allie, “Maybe I just have contagious paranoia. That’s what Heather’s really worried about, that it sounds like such a scary wolf that everyone will go berserk about it. But the thing is, the bottleneck for being able to assess it accurately is cryptography. We’re reading their coded traffic, but we’re reading it three to five weeks late, because that’s as much as Lenny Plekhanov is able to do for us.”
“Who’s Lenny Plekhanov? Other than the nice guy in the wheelchair that Heather goes out with now and then, I mean?” Now that it was clear Allie was going to get everything she wanted, without a fight, she was back to her sweet, pleasant, teasing self.
Heather flushed slightly and said, “Well, that’s the main way you’ve met him, I know. But we met because over at No Such Agency, there’s an amateur crypto section—ever since secrecy collapsed, computers became so cheap, and the economy produced a mathematician surplus, it’s been pretty cheap and easy for anybody—drug gangs, animal liberators, little political outfits, computer-crime outfits, anybody—to create codes as hard to break as only governments used to be able to do. So any Fed agency with an amateur-crypto problem goes to Lenny, and he gets them whatever analysts he can. It’s not timely or efficient, but we don’t have the resources—”
“Then you are going to go into that meeting, say ‘thirty thousand saboteurs could attack any minute,’ and I’ll find you the resources, Heather.” Allie didn’t sound as happy. “Arnie, how fast could you be up to date with a dedicated crypto operation?”
“Almost overnight.”
Allie looked at both of them. “You know I adore you both, and there’s no one I value more around DoF, aside from the personal side of things. But this is dumb, guys. Now tell me how you’re going to flatten Browder and Crittenden.”
Heather hated these moments with Allie; never a second to think of what you were going to do. But before she could start to stammer and temporize, Arnie handed Heather a pill drive, and said, “She’s going to use this, and then I’ll come in and be the brilliant explainer if they still have questions.”
“What is it?” Heather asked.
“I’ve scripted a slideshow on the subject—suitable for presentation by you, and with some stuff that ought to shut Browder and Crittenden up—and it’s only a few minutes long. Plenty of time between now and the morning meeting to go over it and rehearse. And no, I didn’t show it to Allie first.”
“Thank you. Great idea.” Heather’s relief was tempered by her realization that A
rnie was, “Managing your boss, Doctor Yang?”
“Somebody has to,” he pointed out.
Heather really didn’t like the way Allie nodded at that.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. GILLETTE, WYOMING. 5:12 A.M. MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
DarwinsActor reminded Zach of the jackass science students back in college, but he still had to listen to the weird little turd of a man explain how they were going to break into the holding bin at the Gillette Municipal Plastics Recycling Facility.
They’d already been over it a few dozen times; this particular Daybreak AG should probably have called itself Team Obsessive Compulsive. Especially me, Zach added to himself. Thank you, Jesus, for letting me see the beam in my own eye, even if it makes me struggle with seeing the mote in his.
DarwinsActor had a hooked nose, one of those vague East Coast accents, a slim, too-hairy little body that made you think maybe he was evolved from a monkey, anyway, and a dab hand at genetically modifying bacteria. He wore an old military-style coat over a torn sweater, a paint-spattered black watch cap, and ripped jeans; all six men in the AG were in bum outfits, sitting in the dark interior of the RV in the freezing predawn of Wyoming October.
Bugs—the other biologist in the team—finally said, “Dar, it’s time, and we all know our parts. Let’s just do it.”
Zach disliked Bugs much less than he disliked DarwinsActor, even though both of them were always trying to put in all that unnecessary evolution crap about how their part of Daybreak would work. DarwinsActor himself had said that they had targeted this facility exactly because it was so badly run that it was practically designed for Daybreak; somehow that never made those bioweenies like DarwinsActor and Bugs realize there had to be an Operator for the universe, too—one Who had designed it for what needed to be done. It was funny how these science guys never thought of anything important; that would need fixing, some day.