The zenith angle (7 page)

“Oh, I see,” said his father. “So then, Derek. Tony must be that good friend of yours who works for Thomas DeFanti.”

Van saw that a response was required of him. “Sort of.”

Rachel bored right in. “Have you ever met Thomas DeFanti, Dr. Vandeveer?”

“Yes,” Van and Dottie chorused. They both always answered to “Dr. Vandeveer.”

“That’ll be my new research post in Colorado,” Dottie said. “With one of Thomas DeFanti’s foundations. He’s always been a very big supporter of astronomy.”

This whole business was very like Dottie, Van thought sadly. If he chose to mess up their fragile, tender status quo, then she would not fight with him about it. No, she would cooperate fully, by messing up their lives even faster. Would Dottie really move all the way from Boston to the Rocky Mountains while he’d be moving from New Jersey to Washington, and working for Jeb’s outfit? There would be nothing left of their life together.

Well, there would be e-mail.

Helga happily chowed down on her chicken wing. Helga didn’t realize it yet, but soon, very soon, Van would have to fire her. He didn’t have any place to keep her. Her nicely furnished suite in Merwinster would be history.

Van pulled a chunk of chicken from the bucket and jammed it in his mouth. He gnawed silently as the rest of them chattered happily. Then Van dumped his bare chicken bone and went out to the Rover. He beeped it open and fetched the Iridium phone. It was heavy and shaped like a brick. Van hadn’t yet had a chance to try out an Iridium phone. The phones were clumsy, expensive, and didn’t work indoors. The Iridium satellite network had gone broke—but at the last minute, the new post-bankruptcy owners had been rescued by the U.S. Defense Department. The U.S. military had suddenly realized that it might be pretty handy to have phones that worked off-road in places like Afghanistan. Now Van would take the plunge for the first time as well. A fatal announcement like accepting Jeb’s job was worth the ridiculous Iridium charge of two dollars a minute. His father hastened after him. He had a bleak, naked look on his face. “I know that they want you in Washington, son! But you don’t have to go through with that. There’s no need for it!”

Van shrugged sheepishly. A teenager’s gesture.

“Think about it. What are you going to get out of this? Do you want a Christmas card from Henry Kissinger? Son, I
know
people from al Qaeda. I’ve met them. They don’t matter in this world. The only way they can matter is to kill themselves inside our jets and buildings. Al Qaeda can’t build anything. They can’t invent anything. But you can, son. You’re a builder, you’re an innovator. People like you are making people like them matter less every day.”

“Look, Dad, I write software, okay? Don’t get all philosophical. I’m never going to shoot anybody. But computer security matters.” Van sighed miserably. “That scene is just so bad. You don’t know what it’s like to run those networks. Nobody knows who hasn’t done it. It’s a much, much bigger mess in there than any normal person imagines. It’s been neglected way too long.”

Van’s grandfather appeared at the door of the duplex. No one had been watching over him. He took off down the sidewalk at a brisk walk.

“Every big outfit gets like that, son,” his father insisted. “If he wasn’t in jail now, I’d take you to meet Aldrich Ames. That son of a bitch is the poster boy for the crisis inside the Company.” His father groaned. “He sold out every asset we had inside Russia. And no one in the Congress even noticed that Ames did that, ever! We had brave people dying who were never missed.”

“Dad, the Internet gets kicked flat by teenagers in Canada. That just won’t do.”

The two of them apprehended his grandfather. “I’m going out for some Marlboros,” the old man protested.

“I want you to have a happy life, son,” his father insisted, taking a firm grip on his grandfather’s bony upper arm. “You have everything, Derek. You’re a big success, you’re enjoying your life. She’s a sweet girl who loves you, that’s a wonderful baby. Do you know what you’re risking there? You’ll never get that back.”

“I don’t get off that easy, Dad. They need me. Because they know I can help. Everybody else has screwed it up.”

“Derek, if you work inside the Beltway, the people who screw things up are gonna become your best friends. They’re going to be your best war buddies. You’re gonna encounter people worse than you can imagine, with problems that don’t bear thinking about. There’s no reason for someone like you to become one of them.”

“No, there’s a very good reason, Dad. I know I can make a difference, so I have to try. If nobody ever tries to fix the world of the Internet, the future will just turn into . . .”

Van broke off. This was a very long speech for him, and his father wasn’t getting it at all. He realized that his father thought of him as a soft, dreamy person, from a lucky generation, leading a charmed life. Van didn’t know whether to feel rage or pity, so he felt what he always felt with his father: gloomy confusion.

He began to shout. “The Internet turns into hell! Some awful, total mess! Where every single decent company goes broke. Viruses and worms breaking everything. Lawsuits everywhere you look. Where crazy people from the very worst places on earth try to rip you off with bank frauds and drugs and filthy pictures . . .”

His father looked at him with alarm. His grandfather was totally bewildered by Van’s outburst. Van sounded wild and crazy, even to himself. Why let on about the nightmare cyber-scenario? He should never have opened his mouth, he thought. He was crushing their cherished, old-fashioned ideals. There were horrors in the world beyond their understanding.

FOUR

CHECHNYA, NOVEMBER 2001

T
he American agents inside Chechnya were rapidly improving their disguises. The Americans would never seem at home in the Caucasus, though. They didn’t have lice, nor did they stink. The Colonel was sharing a rocky, blasted ledge with the American agent called Kickoff. The two of them were very close, so close as to be quite intimate. Kickoff wore a black fur hat and crumpled Soviet combat fatigues. To that extent, Kickoff looked normal for Chechnya. Yet his teeth were white and perfect beneath his salt-and-pepper beard, and his skin was uncannily clean. Silky mountain-climbing underwear kept his precious American body toasty from wrist to ankles. Kickoff wore strong, beautifully knitted socks. He even wore sock
liners.
Thin, magical membranes that kept the painful rot of trench foot away. They were like condoms for his feet.

The Colonel himself stank badly of sweat, fear, boredom, vodka, and strong cigarettes. But his personal reek was lost in the awesome stench from a dead donkey’s rotting haunch and fetlock. Endless skirmishes had been fought over this vulnerable run of the Chechnyan pipeline. The shallow little cave the Colonel shared with Kickoff was a well-known bandit lair. It was routinely scourged by passing federal helicopters. Every once in a while the lightning-sticks would blow a smuggler’s donkey apart. Tonight he and Kickoff would be killing bandits. Not all of them, of course. Just enough to prove a concept to Kickoff’s employers. There were not enough soldiers in all the world to guard all the world’s pipelines from all the world’s thieves, saboteurs, and vandals. That task would have to be automated somehow, for those pipelines were the arteries of all the world’s machines. Like clouding mosquitoes, human bandits had learned to pierce those pipes and drink deep. So, in return, the threatened machines would have to learn to seek, hunt, and kill.

Kickoff handed the Colonel his heavy, brick-shaped satellite phone.

“Hello again, Alexei,” said the phone in Russian.

“Hi sexy,” said the Colonel, his morale improving at once. It no longer seemed odd to the Colonel that he talked on a satellite telephone to a distant woman in Bethesda, Maryland, merely in order to communicate with Kickoff. Kickoff knew no more than a dozen words of Russian. Yet Kickoff was a practical man. If he couldn’t haul his translator into a killing zone, he would simply phone her.

“We’ve grown so intimate in such a short time, my dear,” the Colonel said into the phone. “Yet I understand we’ll be parting soon.”

“I’m sad about that, too. But it’s the nature of their business, dear Alexei.”

Kickoff zippered open his dappled weapons bag. He produced a marvelous, long-barreled sniper rifle, made of carbon fiber, polished fiberglass, and dense white plastic. He then seized the phone and barked into it.

The Colonel accepted the phone once again.

“That was a whole lot of stupid technical crap about his big gun,” the woman said. “Are you interested in that? Should I bother?”

Kickoff was ex-American military—he had a soldier’s eyes—but he was officially a civilian consultant. This was the first time the Colonel had ever seen Kickoff handle a weapon. Kickoff’s lethal machine was a Western .50-caliber rifle, privately produced. Pampered special-ops gangs carried toys of that sort when, unlike Russian troops in Chechnya, they were not killing Moslem terrorists in the mud and blood every single day.

“Darling, I’m interested if you’re interested. You tell me all about it. Just how wonderful is Kickoff’s big gun?”

“Oh, in bed, I suppose you mean. Well, he’s wonderful in bed,” said the woman coolly. She was an American, and completely lost to modesty. The Colonel liked her very much for this. It was so refreshing.

“He’s in good condition, with a handsome face,” the Colonel told her. “Such good teeth Kickoff has.”

“His name is not ‘Kickoff.’ His name is Michael Hickok.”

The Colonel mulled over this correction. “Hickok, Kickoff.” For the life of him, he couldn’t hear any difference there. And why would that matter anyway, when they never spoke except through her, their translator? Women had such odd priorities.

“Does he love you at all?” the Colonel asked. “Does that matter to him?”

“Not one bit does he love me.” She was bitter. “He doesn’t even know what that means. ‘Have a nice day,’ that is what he tells me. Oh, and he buys me cheap, sexy underwear.”

“My dear, how is it that we human beings forgot how to love? How did the world even come to such a state?” said the Colonel, warming to his theme. “Since this may be my last chance to ask you, may I seek your customary good advice in an intimate matter? I must decide what to do about Natalya.”

“You shouldn’t even ask me about that, Alexei. I never have any luck.”

“If I leave Natalya here, the bandits kill her for being my mistress. If I take her home to Petersburg, the mafia kills her because she is dark. If we stay here in the Caucasus, then they kill both of us, eventually. And then there’s my wife, of course. What on earth is to be done?”

“All right, I’ll tell you. Get some money and leave Russia. My mother emigrated to New York in 1978. So my dear mother is finally free of Russia, and I, her only beloved daughter, now I have hopeless affairs with crazy American mercenaries.”

The woman sighed in pain from the far side of the world. “At least ‘Executive Solutions’ got me this great translator job. They’ve got medical, dental, everything. I could get liposuction.”

Kickoff brusquely seized the phone again.

“Now he wants you to look through his big rifle’s telescope,” the woman reported. “He’s also angry that you spend so much time talking to me, while you hardly say one single word to him.”

“That’s because you are so wise and charming, while he is merely a professional killer. Can we discuss something truly important now? My Natalya is the only happy woman in Chechnya. That is the truth. There is something so profoundly erotic about surrendering yourself to a deadly enemy . . . Natalya has a holy, abject quality, very feminine . . . It’s as if she absorbs me . . . I’m bewildered by it, it’s a spiritual calamity . . . I used to rage at her, helplessly, confusedly . . . I love her so much that I can’t even drink anymore . . .”

Kickoff gestured impatiently at the enormous rifle. Wearied by his duty, the Colonel lowered himself to his elbows and obediently gazed through the black rubber-cupped eyepiece. He had seen night-vision goggles before. Alfa troops had them. But never a device like this. This was fantastic. The rifle’s scope opened up the Chechen evening like the eye of an owl. Now Kickoff was growling into the phone at the embittered woman in America. The American’s corporate sponsors had sent Kickoff here with a huge stack of war toys and no language skills. Kickoff had ventured into the wilds of Chechnya with three little toy robot airplanes, six videocameras, a hundred delicate wind gauges, satellite phones, solar panels, a shatterproof military computer in a camouflaged gunmetal case . . . Kickoff bore a stack of cash, and many discreet documents issued by various oligarchs and moguls. Tyumen Oil and ConocoPhilips, LUKoil and ExxonMobil, Sibneft, Halliburton and ChevronTexaco. The signature of Igor Yusufov of the Energy Ministry was much in evidence in Kickoff’s papers. Alexei Kuznetsov, Thomas DeFanti, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. There was even an importation permit signed by no less a man than Vladimir Putin.

It was not that Kickoff knew these important men personally, or that they would ever need to know him. However, they seemed to feel some need for the services Kickoff provided. When Kickoff declared that was he not a spy, but an American working legally on contract from civilian companies, he was probably telling the truth.

The Colonel shifted Kickoff’s weapon on its bipod and trailed the eerie scope across the wrecked and glowing landscape. Repeated bombings had reduced the local storage tanks to fragments of riveted steel. Spindly trees, ten years old, grew from the tortured heaps of black tarmac and bad concrete. The hotter surfaces glowed vividly in the scope’s computer lens. It looked uncanny, surgical, as if the veins of the earth had opened and bled.

Why was such visual poetry restricted to the mundane work of shooting pipeline thieves?

The Colonel daintily twiddled a diopter. The crescent Moon grew huge in the rifle’s crosshairs, blooming in a square rush of pixels. Now the Moon looked big and cheese-orange, like a rind of fancy pizza from Moscow’s finest Pizza Hut. Machine analysis worked its magic inside the rifle’s optics. The blazing crescent of the Moon toned down, down, and the vast dark plain between the lunar horns emerged in the Colonel’s vision. This was, thought the Colonel with holy awe, the Moon shining gently back at him in light reflected from the Earth.