At least, that had always been the implicit understanding. But understandings could change. And after his night’s experience, he found himself inhabiting a different world.
“Unless I miss my guess,” Oscar said, “our kidnappers had a rendezvous at the Sabine River last night. They were planning to smuggle us across the state line, to hand us over to some crowd of Huey’s militia. But they were jumped in the dark, by some kind of night-flying U.S. tiger team. Airborne armed commandos of some kind, who surprised Huey’s people on the ground last night, and absolutely shot them to pieces.”
“Why on earth would they do such a thing?” Greta said, shocked. “They should have used nonlethal force and arrested them.”
“Airborne commandos aren’t policemen. They’re genuine special-forces fanatics, who still use real guns! And when they spotted that French spy submarine in the water, they must have lost their tempers. I mean, imagine their reaction. If you’re a heavily armed U.S. black-helicopter ace, and you see a secret submarine sneaking up an American river…well, once you’ve pulled the trigger, you can’t strafe a thing like that just once.”
Greta’s brows knitted. “Did you really see a submarine, Oscar?”
“Oh yes. I can’t swear that it was French, but it sure wasn’t one of ours. Americans don’t build cute, efficient little submarines. We prefer our submarines bigger than a city block. Besides, it all makes sense that way. The French have an aircraft carrier offshore. They’ve got drones flying over the bayous. The French invented the frogman-spy tradition…So of course it was a cute little French sub. Poor bastards.”
“You know,” Kevin said thoughtfully, “normally, I’m very down on law-and-order issues, but I think I like this Two Feathers guy. The deal is—all you have to do is call him! They wake him up at four AM, and your problem is solved before dawn! This new President is a take-charge guy! The old guy would never have pulled a stunt like that. This is a real change of pace for America, isn’t it? It’s executive authority in action, that’s what it is! It’s like—he’s the Chief Executive, so he just executes ’em!”
“I don’t think that a shooting war between state and federal spooks is what the President had in mind for his first day in office,” Oscar said. “That’s not a healthy development for American democracy.”
“Oh, get over it!” Kevin scoffed. “Kidnapping is terrorism! You can’t take a soft line with terrorists—there’s no end to that crap! The bastards got exactly what was coming to them! And that’s just what we need inside the Collaboratory, too. We need an iron hand with these scumbags…” Kevin scowled mightily, gripping the peeling wheel of the car in uncontrollable excitement. “Man, it chaps my ass to think of those crooked tinkertoy coppers in there, getting ready to bust up those eggheads. And here I am—me, Kevin Hamilton, thirty-two years old—a fugitive again, running scared. If I only had, like, twenty heavy-duty Irish Southies with some pool cues and table legs. There’s only twelve lousy cops in that whole laboratory. They haven’t been doing anything for ten years, except tapping phone lines and taking payoffs. We could beat those sons of bitches into bad health.”
“This is a new you we’re hearing from, Kevin,” Oscar observed.
“Man, I never knew that I could just talk to the President! Y’know, I’m a prole, and a hacker, and a phone phreak. I admit all that. But when you get to be my age, you just get sick of outsmarting them all the time! You get tired of having to dodge ’em, that’s all. How come I have to sneak around in the cracks in the floorboards? I tell you, Dr. Penninger—you let me run your security, you’d see some changes made.”
“Are you telling me that you want to be the lab’s security chief, Mr. Hamilton?”
“No, of course I’m not, but…” Kevin paused in surprise. “Well, yeah! Yeah, sure! I can do it! I’m up for the damn job! Give me the damned cop budget. Give me all the badges and the batons. Hell yeah, I can do anything you want. Make me the federal authorities.”
“Well,” she said, “I’m the lab’s Director, and I’m lying down in your backseat, wearing handcuffs. I don’t see anyone else volunteering to help me.”
“I could do it for you, Dr. Penninger, I swear I could. I could take that whole place over, if there were more than three of us. But as it is…” He shrugged. “Well, I guess we just drive around at random, makin’ phone calls.”
“I never drive without a goal,” Oscar told him.
“So, man, do you know where we’re going? Where is that?”
“Where’s the nearest big camp of Moderators?”
The Canton Market had been a Texas tradition since the 1850s. Every weekend before the first Monday of the month, traders, collectors, flea marketeers, and random gawkers gathered from hundreds of miles around for three days of hands-on commercial scrap-and-patchwork. Naturally this ancient and deeply attractive tradition had been completely co-opted by prole nomads.
Oscar, Greta, and Kevin found themselves joining a road migration heading northeast toward the makeshift city. In Kevin’s rented junker, they fitted with ease into the traffic: tankers, flatbeds, gypsy buses, winter-wrapped roadside hitchhikers.
In the meantime, Oscar and Greta climbed into the backseat together, to see to one another’s scrapes, welts, and bruises. Greta was still handcuffed, while Oscar’s broken head had barely clotted. They sat together while Kevin munched a take-out sandwich and wiped the fog of breath from his car’s cold windows.
Checking one another’s injuries was a slow and intimate process. It involved much tender unbuttoning of shirts, indrawn breaths of hurt surprise, sympathetic tongue-clicking, and the ultragentle dabbing of antiseptic unguents. They’d both taken a serious pounding, in normal circumstances requiring a medical checkup and a couple of days of bed rest. Their heads swam and ached from the knockout gas, a side effect only partly curable by temple rubbing, brow smoothing, and gentle lingering kisses.
Greta was stoic. She forced him to share her personal hangover cure: six aspirin, four acetaminophen, three heaping spoonfuls of white sugar, and forty micrograms of over-the-counter lysergic acid. This mélange, she insisted authoritatively, would “pep them up.”
In the late afternoon, they left the crowded highway and darted east on an obscure country dirt road. There they parked and awaited a rendezvous. Within an hour they were joined by Yosh Pelicanos, who was piloting a rental car with his own satellite locator.
Pelicanos was, as always, efficient and resourceful. He had brought them laptops, cash cards, a first-aid kit, two suitcases of clothes, plastic sprayguns, new phones, and last but far from least, a new, yard-long bolt cutter.
Kevin had the most extensive experience with police handcuffs. So he set to work on Greta’s bonds with the bolt cutter, while Oscar changed clothes inside Pelicanos’s spacious and shiny rental car.
“You people look like three zombies. I hope you know what you’re doing,” Pelicanos told him mournfully. “All hell is breaking loose back at the lab.”
“How’s the krewe handling the crisis?” Oscar said, tenderly shaving the hair from the ragged gash above his ear.
“Well, some of us are with the Strike Committee, some are holing up in the hotel. We can still move in and out of the lab, but that won’t last. Word is that they’ll seal the facility soon. The Collaboratory cops are going to break the Strike. There are Buna city cops and county sheriffs cruising all around our hotel, and Greta’s committee is too scared to leave the Hot Zone…We’ve been sucker-punched, Oscar. Our people are totally confused. Word is out that you’re criminals, you’ve abandoned us. Morale is subterranean.”
“So how’s the float going on our black-propaganda rap?” Oscar said.
“Well, the elopement pitch was very hot. How could a sex angle not be hot? I mean, basically, that’s the outing move that we always expected. They’re circulating photo stills of you and Greta at that dump in Holly Beach.”
“Those Louisiana state troopers had telephotos,” Oscar sighed. “I knew it all along.�
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“The sex scandal didn’t break in the straight press yet. I’ve had dozens of calls, but the journos can’t get any confirmation. That’s just a typical sex smear. Nobody in the Collaboratory takes that seriously. Everybody in Buna already knows that you’re having sex with Greta. No, the serious attack was the embezzlement rap. That’s dead serious. Because the lab’s money is really gone.”
“How much did he steal?” Oscar said.
“He stole the works! The lab is bankrupt. It’s bad. It’s worse than bad. It’s beyond mere bankruptcy. It’s total financial wreckage, because all the lab’s budgets and all the records are trashed. I’ve never seen anything like it. Even the backups have been targeted and garbaged. The system can’t even add, it can’t update, it churns out nonsense. It’s a total financial lobotomy.”
“American military infowar viruses,” Oscar said. “Huey’s loot from the Air Force base.”
“Sure, that had to be military,” Pelicanos nodded. “People have brought down national governments with those things. The lab’s computers never had a chance.”
“How long before you can restore functionality?” Oscar said.
“Are you kidding? What am I, a miracle worker?” Pelicanos was genuinely wounded. “I’m just an accountant! I can’t repair the damage from a military netwar attack! In fact, I think someone’s been monitoring me, personally. Every file that I’ve accessed in the past two months has been specifically destroyed. I think they’ve even screwed with my own laptop—some kind of black-bag job. I can’t trust my own personal machine anymore. I can’t even trust my off-site records.”
“Fine, Yosh, I take the point, it’s out of your league. So whose league is this in? Who’s going to help us here?”
Pelicanos thought hard about the question. “Well, first, you’d need a huge team of computer-forensics specialists to go over the damaged code line by line…No, forget that. Investigating and describing the damage would take years. It would cost a fortune. Let’s face it, the lab’s books are a write-off, they’re totaled. It would be cheaper to drop the whole system off a cliff and start all over from scratch.”
“I think I understand,” Oscar said. “Huey permanently trashed the lab’s finances. He’s ruined a federal laboratory with an interstate netwar attack, just to get his krewe off a few corruption hooks. That’s appalling. It’s horrifying. The man has no conscience. Well, at least we know where we stand now.”
Pelicanos sighed. “No, Oscar, it’s much, much worse than that. The Spinoffs people were always Huey’s favorite allies. They knew they were next up on Greta’s chopping block, so last night they rebelled. The Spinoffs gang have launched a counterstrike. They’ve sealed and barricaded the Spinoffs building, and they’re having a round-the-clock shredding orgy. They’re stealing all the data they can get their hands on, and they’re shredding everything else. When they’re done, they’ll all defect to Huey’s brand-new science labs in Louisiana. And they’re trying to convince everyone else to go with them.”
Oscar nodded, absorbing the news. “Okay. That’s vandalism. Obstruction of justice. Theft and destruction of federal records. Commercial espionage. All the Spinoffs people should be arrested immediately and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Pelicanos laughed dryly. “As if,” he said.
“This isn’t over,” Oscar said. “Because our kidnapping fell through. We have the tactical initiative again. Huey doesn’t know where we are. At least we’re well out of his reach.”
“So—what’ll it be? Where should we go now? Boston? Washington?”
“Well…” Oscar rubbed his chin. “Huey’s next moves are obvious, right? He’s going to crash the Collaboratory just like he did the Air Force base. Thanks to his infowar attack, there’s no money now. Soon, there will be no supplies, no food…Then he’ll send in a massive crowd of proles to occupy the derelict facility, and it’s all over.”
“That’s how it looks, all right.”
“He’s not superhuman, Yosh. Well, I take that back—I’m pretty sure that Huey is superhuman. But Huey screwed up. If Huey hadn’t screwed up, Greta and I would be languishing in some private prison in a dismal swamp right now.”
Greta’s handcuffs parted, with a ping and snap so loud that Oscar heard it from outside the car. Greta opened the back door of Kevin’s wretched car, and she climbed out, stretching her cramped back and shoulders. While Kevin stowed the bolt cutter in the trunk, Greta came to join them. She approached Pelicanos’s car and looked through the driver’s window, rubbing her sore wrists.
“What’s the game plan?” she said.
“We have the element of surprise,” Oscar said. “And we’ll have to use that for all it’s worth.”
“When can I go back to the lab? I really want to go back to my lab.”
“We’ll go. But when we go, we’ll have to go back very hard. We’ll have to attack the Collaboratory and take it over by force.”
Pelicanos stared at Oscar as if he had lost his mind. Greta rubbed her chilly arms, and looked grave and troubled.
“Now you’re talking!” Kevin announced, punching the air.
“It’s doable,” Oscar said. He opened the car door and stepped into the cold winter wind. “I know it sounds crazy, but think it through. Greta is still the legitimate Director. The Collaboratory’s cops aren’t crack troops, they’re just a bunch of functionaries.”
“You can’t ask the people in the Collaboratory to attack the police,” Greta said. “They just won’t do that. It’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s unethical, it’s unprofessional…and, besides, it’s very dangerous, isn’t it?”
“Actually, Greta, I’m dead certain that your scientists would love to beat up some cops, but I take your point. It would take us far too long to talk those harmless intellectuals into clobbering anyone. My little krewe of pols aren’t exactly hardened anarchist street-fighters, either. But if we can’t restore order in the lab, right away, today, then your administration is doomed. And your lab is doomed. So we have to risk it. This crisis requires total resolve. We have to physically seize that facility. What we need at this juncture are some tough, revolutionary desperados.” Oscar drew a breath. “So let’s drive into this flea market and hire ourselves some goons.”
They abandoned Pelicanos’s perfectly decent car for security reasons, and piled together into Kevin’s unlicensed junker. Then they drove on.
Their first challenge was a Moderator roadblock, south of Canton. The Texan prole lads manning the roadblock gave them curious stares. Oscar’s hat was askew, barely hiding the bandaged gash in his head. Kevin was unshaven and twitchy. Greta had her arms crossed to hide her chafed wrists. Pelicanos looked like an undertaker.
“Come down from outta state?” the Moderator said. He was a freckle-faced Anglo kid with blue plastic hair, headphones, eight wooden beaded necklaces, a cellphone, and a fringed deerskin jacket. His legs were encased from the knees down in giant mukluks of furry plastic.
“Yo!” Kevin said, offering a wide variety of secret high signs.
The Moderator watched Kevin’s antics with bemusement. “Y’all ever been to Texas before?”
“We’ve heard of the Canton flea market,” Kevin assured him. “It’s famous.”
“Could I have a five-dollar parkin’ fee, please?” The Moderator pocketed his plastic cash and glued a sticker to their windshield. “Y’all just follow the beeps on this sticker, it’ll lead to y’all’s parking lot. Have a good time at the fair!”
They drove slowly into the town. Canton was a normal East Texas burg of modest two- and three-story buildings: groceries, clinics, churches, restaurants. The streets were swarming with weirdly dressed foot traffic. The huge crowds of proles seemed extremely well organized; they were serenely ignoring the traffic lights, but they were moving in rhythmic gushes and clumps, filtering through the town in a massive folk dance.
Kevin parked below a spreading pine tree in a winter-browned cow pasture, and they left
their vehicle. The sun was shining fitfully, but there was an uneasy northern breeze. They joined a small crowd and walked to the edge of the market.
The sprawling market campground was dominated by the soaring plastic spines of homemade cellular towers. Dragonfly flocks of tinkertoy aircraft buzzed the terrain. The biggest shelters were enormous polarized circus tents of odd-smelling translucent plastic on tall spindly poles.
Kevin bought four sets of earclips from a blanket vendor. “Here, put these on.”
“Why?” Greta said.
“Trust me, I know my way around a place like this.”
Oscar pinched the clamp onto his left ear. The device emitted a little wordless burbling hum, the sound a contented three-year-old might make. As long as he moved with the crowd, the little murmur simply sat there at his ear, an oddly reassuring presence, like a child’s make-believe friend. However, if he interfered with the crowd flow—if he somehow failed to take a cue—the earcuff grew querulous. Stand in the way long enough, and it would bawl.
Somewhere a system was mapping out the flow of people, and controlling them with these gentle hints. After a few moments Oscar simply forgot about the little murmurs; he was still aware of them, but not consciously. The nonverbal nagging was so childishly insistent that accommodating it became second nature. Soon the four of them were moving to avoid the crowds, well before any approaching crowds could actually appear. Everyone was wearing the earcuffs, so computation was arranging human beings like a breeze blowing butterflies.
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