The zenith angle (25 page)

Over the roar of the plane’s engines, the giggles sounded a lot like Fawn Glickleister. At least, Van hoped it was Fawn. It was pretty horrible to think that two women in the world would both giggle like that, and that Michael Hickok would sleep with both of them.

“Mike, you’re a pilot, right?”

“I’ve got a pilot’s license,” Hickok said, yawning. “That don’t make me Top Gun.”

“Okay, you remember that AFOXAR device we were working on? The hijacker interface that overrides and controls private jets?”

“I thought you blew that off, Van. You and your big fat boss can’t afford to rent any big fat private jet for your big fat shindig in Virginia.”

“I just found a friend who will loan me his big fat jet.”

“Oh,” Hickok concluded. “So that would be different.”

“Now I need some guy who can fly a Boeing Business Jet, from the ground, with that little joystick.”

Hickok chuckled richly. “Hey, you just found your man!”

“Can you pick me up at Dulles tonight? I’ve got to stop by my apartment on the way to the Vault.”

“What, you mean right now? I’ve gotta drive some more? I just got here! I broke speed laws in fifteen states!”

“I get in at nine,” Van said. “If you’re still busy, bring Fawn with you.”

Hickok slapped his cell phone shut with a flat plastic clack.

Van’s flight arrived late due to weather. Hickok was waiting, and he stared right past him. Van tapped Hickok’s shoulder.

“Whoa! Van! Where’s the beard?”

Van shrugged.

Hickok squinted. “You gotta do something serious about that long-ass hair now, Professor. You look like the jumbo version of the Little Dutch Boy.”

Hickok hated leaving his Humvee parked outside Van’s Washington apartment. The Humvee was a military super-jeep, but Hickok, with a Southern-boy pride in his wheels, hated the thought of its paint job ever coming to harm.

“I can’t believe you live around here,” Hickok groused. “There’s hookers around here. There’s crack gangs!”

“I’m a security expert,” said Van. He avoided a splatter of vomit on his stairs.

“Like what, so that makes my car safer?”

Van pulled his keys. But the door of his apartment opened at a touch. “Oh, Lord,” he blurted. The lamp was lit. Van looked around. Nothing obvious was missing. There wasn’t much in the apartment to lose.

The keyboard of his Linux machine had been pried open.

“They’re still in here!” Hickok said tautly.

The door of Van’s bathroom swung out. A stranger stepped out with a gun. Van was astounded. When leveled at his own chest, the black barrel of a pistol looked as cavernous as a garage. Van had no idea who this intruder was, but he instantly recognized the handgun as a seven-shot, all-electronic, Australian-made O’Dwyer VLE. A really nice gun. A great gun. A real beauty. How could he get killed by some device that he had once taken apart with his own hands?

“Yo, Fred!” said Hickok, his deep voice squeaking just a little. “Long time no see!”

“Reach for the sky,” Fred ordered.

Hickok only laughed. “I’m not packing any heat. You’re packing heat in here, Fred?”

“I’m on assignment,” Fred said defensively.

“You have any idea who you’re aiming to shoot here? This guy is from the National Security Council!

Dr. Derek Vandeveer, this would be Mr. Federico Gonzales. Old war buddy of mine.”

Gonzales scowled. “Why the hell did you have to tell this chump my name?”

“We’re supposed to be all on one side in the War on Terror, aren’t we? You let me know if you changed sides, Fred.”

“Nope,” said Fred. He kept the pistol steady, though, and he spoke from the side of his mustached lip.

“You might as well come out now, kid.”

A second burglar emerged from Van’s bathroom. He was tall, stooped, and thin as whipcord. He wore black-rimmed glasses, and had a military haircut. The “jarhead” look. Brown fringe on top, white sidewalls all around.

The second burglar carried a black plastic impact-resistant toolbox in one big hand.

“Hey, you guys are AFOCI,” Van realized, recognizing the hardware.

“No, sir, I’m William C. Wimberley.”

“But that’s an AFOCI toolbox,” Van insisted. “I helped to vet that thing.”

“Air Force Office of Cyber Investigation,” Hickok clarified. “The AFOCI boys are in and out of the professor’s office all the time.”

“We’re not AFOCI,” said Gonzales. “I heard of ’em, though.”

“We’re Cyberspace Force,” said Wimberley.

“Okay, maybe he’s in Cyberspace,” said Gonzales hastily. “That doesn’t mean I have to be in any damn Cyberspace.”

“You just installed an AFOCI keyboard bug inside my Linux box,” said Van, staring at Wimberley.

“Okay, yeah, fine,” Wimberley told him. “Maybe I did that. Why should you care? You would never have known about that.”

“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? Of course I would have known!”

“Nobody ever looks inside their keyboards,” said Wimberley with a sneer. He was very young. “Not even you, Professor. I know who I’m talking to here, okay? If I hadn’t pled out, you would have testified at my trial!”

Van stared at him. Wimberley looked vaguely familiar, but only vaguely. “So what was your handle?”

“Bionic Ninja of 214.”

An anklebiter. “What, you were like fifteen back then?”

“Sixteen,” Wimberley said. “The Secret Service broke into my parents’ house. My mom never got over that. She still takes Prozac. All just because I borrowed a little long distance from your sad-ass phone company that just lost forty-five billion dollars!”

Van took a sorrowful breath. “The Air Force didn’t mind your rap sheet?”

“The modern United States military loves troubled, aggressive young men with high IQs,” Wimberley told him. He had a settled voice and a lethal stare.

With an effort, Van stopped his knees from shaking. The hell of it was that Wimberley’s bug would have worked. Of course Van would never have looked inside his own keyboard, and the tiny device would have been silently beaming every keystroke he made to some monitoring station blocks away.

“Look, I’m NSC, and I know something about your so-called outfit. The U.S. Space Force can’t just start up a ‘Cyberspace Force’ on its own get-go. They’ve got no policy guidance from the top.”

Gonzales weighed in suddenly. “The Space Force are the only service branch that can run mil-spec cyber-security,” he recited. “No other military outfit has the extensive computer networks or the time-tested technical skills.”

“Are you nuts?” said Van. “The Space Force is supposed to run satellites! That’s got nothing to do with viruses or DOS attacks! The guys tasked with defending military systems are the Computer Network Defense Joint Task Force over at DISA.”

“Who’s Deeza?” said Wimberley. “I never heard of ’em.”

“They’ve been at the job since 1998!”

Hickok was even more skeptical. “Look here, kid, there ain’t no such thing as ‘cyberspace’!”

“There is if we say there is,” insisted Wimberley.

“But why did you come here to my place?” Van said. He was genuinely baffled.

“I hate to break the news to you, Professor, but information warfare happens inside people’s computers! And you, you’re trying to sabotage a mission-critical eighteen-billion-dollar satellite project!

You don’t think important people are gonna notice about that? We know what you’re up to.”

Alarmed, Van turned to Hickok. Hickok just shrugged. “ ‘Important people,’ he says.”

“You’re a left-wing professor from Stanford,” Wimberley amplified. “You’re a peacenik.”

“ ‘Left-wing’?” said Van, stunned. “ ‘Peacenik’? I just had lunch with Paul Wolfowitz!”

“Your wife is in the antiwar movement,” said Wimberley. “She was Eastern Seaboard Coordinator for Physicists for Social Responsibility!”

“Dottie is from
Massachusetts
!” Van said, outraged. “They’re all like that up there!”

Wimberley stared back at him. “Don’t you ever Google yourself? It’s written all over you. Look at that hair and those clothes.”

“And that’s supposed to give you some kind of right to Watergate my apartment?” Van blurted.

“Oh, yeah,” said Wimberley. “It generally does.”

“Nobody ever catches us,” said Gonzales, shifting his shining handgun and looking at his wristwatch.

“You’re supposed to be way off in another state. We’re supposed to be long gone from here by now.”

“Yeah,” said Wimberley, hefting his case. “We kinda need to be going right now.”

“Hold on,” said Van. “I just happen to be the Deputy Technical Director of the CCIAB.”

“So what?” said Wimberley. “I never heard of them either.”

“So I built you that burglar case, you sorry little punk! There’s no way you’re just walking out of here when you just broke into my own house and tapped my own computer with my own hardware!”

Wimberley set the heavy plastic case by his feet and folded his long, wiry arms. “What are you gonna do about it, Dr. Superspy? Call the cops on me?”

“I’ve got a gun right here,” Gonzales bargained hopefully.

Hickok chuckled. “Aw, come on, Fred.”

“If you want these cyberweapons,” said Wimberley, putting his boot on the case, “then you’re gonna have to
take them away from me.
”

Blood rushed hotly to Van’s face. “You don’t think I could do that?”

Wimberley laughed in scorn. “Let me put you in touch with reality! I’m not some make-believe warfighter, like you are. I enlisted, dude. I am tomorrow’s cyber-military. You’re just some flabby-ass civilian professor from some failed telecom company. Plus, you’re ten years older than me. So if you attempt to confiscate my weapons here, I will kick your fat ass right up between your shoulders.”

“You are out of your mind,” Van told him. “You’re some nutcase punk who called himself ‘Bionic Ninja.’ I outweigh you by fifty pounds. Plus, this is
my house
!”

Wimberley turned to Gonzales. “The hippie here is hallucinating. I think maybe you’d better just shoot these guys.”

Gonzales snorted. He thumb-jacked the magazine out of his pistol and threw it to Hickok. Hickok, ever-alert, snatched the bullet clip right out of midair.

Gonzales sat down cozily in Van’s magnesium chair. “Do I look that stupid?” he announced. “One bullet, two bullets, that’s not even gonna slow this dude here down. Because, boys, this dude here is Air Force Special Operations, just like me. Mike Hickok and me, we are always ‘The First Ones There’!”

Hickok burst into laughter. He sat on Van’s stained and ragged couch, with a loud thrum of broken springs. “Aw, come on, Fred, this is D.C., man. This is some guy’s apartment!”

Gonzales put both his elbows on his knees. “The way I see it, these candy-ass computer geeks have got a score to settle.”

“You’re right,” Van said. The words startled him as they hit his own ears, but then he realized that he meant them. Rage rumbled through his chest like a rolling cannonball. He was in deadly earnest. Hickok coughed into his fist. “Van, sit down. Let ’em both go. It’s all some big mistake.”

“Your friend Fred here can go if he wants,” Van said. “I didn’t build him that O’Dwyer pistol. That intrusion case though. That tool case is mine.”

Wimberley took off his black-rimmed glasses and set them on a table at the foot of Van’s lamp. “I can see that I’ve got to kick this guy’s ass now,” he announced. He put one fist inside another and loudly cracked his knuckles. “This won’t take long.” He looked at Hickok and Gonzales. “I just don’t want to see you two snake-eater boys start crying about this, or anything.”

“Are we gonna cry, Mike?” Gonzales asked Hickok.

“You ever see me cry, Fred? We were in Bosnia damn Herzegovina.” Hickok’s face was alight with a greed for battle. “My cybergeek is gonna wipe the floor with your cybergeek.”

“No way, homey.”

“Yes way. Because he is smarter, man. My computer geek is like ten times smarter than your geek.”

Gonzales barked with laughter. “What the hell difference does his brain make?”

Van took his glasses off and set them aside. He tried to stare into Wimberley’s eyes. Without his glasses, the enemy’s eyes were two distant brown blurs.

Wimberley’s first swing was a contemptuous slap. The slap was a spiritual experience. In one Zen instant, it found the black fury that lived within Van and brought it to roaring life. Van lunged forward. The flying impact of his body knocked Wimberley straight backward and into the magnesium chair. Gonzales leapt free of it, hunched and dodging, and the beautiful chair went legs-up and buckled, with an expensive crunch.

Van was suddenly gasping for air. Something had plunged deep into his gut. It was Wimberley’s boot. The kid scrambled nimbly back to his feet. Quick, hot impacts. One in the eye. One in the forehead. Van got a clawing hand into his enemy’s collar and slung him headlong into the room’s single lamp. The lamp tumbled and the room went dark.

Van clenched his fists and swung at empty air. Suddenly the enemy was on his back, leaping on him from behind. Van stumbled backward, smashing his assailant against the wall. Wimberley wheezed. Van tore a choking elbow loose from his throat. Wimberley’s shoes scraped the wall, and with a powerful kick, he heaved them both away. Van stumbled and tottered off balance, groping wildly. He plummeted. He crashed suddenly, blindingly, smashingly, into the sharp, rigid corner of his computer table. He felt his whole skull cave in. His mouth flooded instantly with blood.

With a bestial roar he lurched upright. Wimberley stumbled, scrambling in darkness. Van kicked his legs from under him, clamped a hand on Wimberley’s scrawny neck, and smashed his head against the floor. The whole building shook. Wimberley emitted a desperate, catlike squall. Van sank a knee into his enemy’s guts and hammered his skull with a fist. Wimberley went limp.

There was a sullen sound of liquid dripping.

The overhead light came on.

Wimberley’s unconscious face was spattered in blood.

“Get up, Van, Jesus, he’s out cold.”

“He’s bleeding,” Van mumbled. A piece of his tooth fell out.

“No, man,
you
are bleeding. You are bleeding all over him. Jesus, what happened to your face?”