The pieces of the puzzle did fit better this way. Subterfuge, at this point, felt more like truth. After Tikhonov's performance in the hovercraft battle, it seemed more natural that he was another one of these occluded government operatives, and not a civilian who had wandered into the scene. Tikhonov seemed a lot more comfortable as Tikhonov rather than Thompson, more able to speak freely about what he knew and did not know.
Tikhonov assured Mackey that everything he had told him about his life was true, just the names and locations were not those he had given. His parents had lived in Angola, but had moved to Russia to work on space program activities. Tikhonov had spent his childhood in the Kazakh foothills in Central Asia, which were not all that different from Idaho. He had learned English there, and perfected his accent while studying abroad in actual Idaho, while simultaneously constructing his back story. He had begun working as an operative for the Bolsheviks not because he enjoyed spying, but so that he could get out of the office apparat, and travel the world.
"What I can tell you truthfully is that we're on the same side, at least for now." He turned from looking out the side of the car to make eye contact with Mackey again. "Like you, I imagine, I have a particular set of ethics that guides my actions. I do what is best for my party, because my party and its members support my ethical goals. To have technology in the workers' control is the most ethical situation. So, our actions are defined by that end, and become ethical when they are in line with it. Right now, our goals line up, so I am allied with you and your Department. To stop this conspiracy between the Commerce Department and the URER is important. Just for different reasons, in your perspective and mine."
Mackey tried to judge what was really behind Tikhonov's eyes. "What if your commitment to your goals means killing people? That is what happens, when you define the means in terms of the ends."
"People kill for all sorts of reasons. For greed, for love, for anger, or for the inability to plan ahead and see it as an inevitable outcome. They arrive at that point, pretending to be unaware, powerless to change the outcome of what they call fate, and claim that violence was the only path for them to take. We can't pretend that the path to our ends merely happens to us. The path, the destination—it's all the same. To create any sort of society, planning ahead is crucial, in order to prevent deaths. That is the real challenge that we all face. To avoid what violence we can, through better planning."
Now it was Mackey's turn to avoid the other man's eyes by looking out the window. "I used to see both the path and the ends. I used to think I could trust what I saw. But now, I'm seeing ends emerge from behind the ends."
Tikhonov nodded.
"My father was the sort of person who believed in a definitive end," Mackey continued. "He believed in Technocracy. If it was a party, he would have carried a membership card. He was a partisan, I suppose. Working for the Postal Administration, he believed he was part of the end goal, and he was happy with that. I always thought that his dedication was overblown. Fanatical, even. I didn't think the difference between Administrationism and Commercialism could be so clearly accepted as a goal in and of itself. I looked at my day's work as an engineer and tried to focus on that as my challenge, to let the challenge of my work be the only goal I had. But now, that seems impossible. I don't know what my father would make of everything I've seen over the last few days. He would be surprised, shocked, I'm sure. But I think he would still know what side he was on. He would still have the end goal in mind."
"I wasn't born a member of the party, you know." Tikhonov let his hand fall onto Mackey's elbow. Mackey didn't move, just looked down at the hand upon his jacket sleeve. "It wasn't predetermined. I could have been just a citizen of the URER, and gotten a job in the bureaucracy somewhere. But at some point, I decided that I wanted to work towards something bigger than what was right in front of me. I didn't want to be a faceless bureaucrat, if you'd excuse me saying so. The Bolshevik end goal is not perfect. It is not the final goal that matters, but using the final goal as a tool to accomplish great things. This is the best goal I could find, and so I'm sticking with it, until they invent a better one."
Mackey thought about himself, and his life's accomplishments thus far. Was he a faceless bureaucrat? He certainly didn't have much to show for his life, except for his job. He had spent his entire life trying to fit in, trying not to stand out, for sake of his career. In that way, he supposed he was a faceless bureaucrat. Or at least, a bureaucrat unwilling to face certain facts.
He looked at Hopper and Tikhonov. They were a pair of spies. Behind every action was a hidden motive, and behind that motive, more hidden actions. They both convinced themselves that there was a deep motivation, a first cause for it all that proved itself with results. And that, they said, was the bottom line. But how could they really think that, if they didn't know who they were fighting against? Commerce, the URER, Megatherium, Roerich, or other unknown ghosts and spirits? If you didn't know your enemy, how could you know when you'd won? They didn't even know the real gods they thought they were fighting for. And meanwhile, people lost lives, and who knew why or whom to blame.
Parsons, on the other hand, saw everything as shrouded and hidden. The manic, mustached man accepted that everything was unknown, and reveled in it. It was all real and unreal, and everyone's contradicting motives were proof of that. So he threw himself headlong into that dark cave, seemingly willing to explode rocket engines, fly strange machinery, accept strange capsules and swallow them, taking the tweaks and holes in reality as part of the scenery. Or did he have some sort of deeper motivation? Was there a part of the conflicting, overlapping realities that he thought had value? Was there some sort of deeper truth that he was searching for—at least until one of his strange flying machines caught fire with him trapped inside?
What about Ross? What was her motivation? The woman had been working with Hopper for who knows how long, and yet she did not seem quite as dedicated to the Department. Despite her status with the Assistant Secretary and with the Department of Transportation, she was not an executive, but an engineer. The clandestine was a sideline. She was still an engineer, using programs to define ballistic motion and orbital patterns on a daily basis. Mathematics then, as she had said in her lab at Plant 42—that was her foundation, and bottom line. And yet, the woman carried a sub-machine gun underneath her flight jacket. How did she reconcile her equations and her guns? Then again, Mackey thought, her equations were meant to guide, among other things, the ballistic paths of nuclear warheads.
Hopper hung up the phone. "There is somewhere I must be, so you two will have to conduct this intrusion on your own."
Mackey thought of protesting, but couldn't see what good it would do. The Assistant Secretary had decided, and therefore, that was the way it was going to be. She produced a small box from her briefcase. It was brown, plastic like a cheap transistor radio, with an aerial and a button on the side. She handed it to Mackey. "Hit the button, and I will pick you up in five minutes on the dot. After you press the button, carry it with you, outside of your pocket. Try not to smash it—it is a bit delicate." He placed the small device in his jacket pocket without giving it much thought.
"What is your plan for entry?" Hopper asked.
"Sales interview," Tikhonov explained. "One of my people has arranged it. The person we have an appointment with has left early, but forgot to clear his schedule. That should get us in the door, and then we will improvise to find the drones."
"Stick with what works," Hopper said. "I'll drop you at the parking entrance."
The reception area of Rand Aeronautical was unfamiliar, an odd sort of space to Mackey's bureaucratic experience. Come to think of it, he couldn't remember the last time he had been in the offices of a private business. The decor was completely different than any governmental agency. There was a similar appeal, perhaps, but it didn't map onto any of the architectural dialects that government buildings spoke.
In the lobby, surrounded by a set of low receiving couches, an abstract sculpture piece formed from chromium parabolas denoted some sort of aerospace or scientific work. There was a phone booth, and a large desk where the receptionist waited for them to approach from the automatic revolving door. These were not entirely unfamiliar objects, and not an entirely unfamiliar space. It was a space for waiting, for the precursors to appointments, the fashionable outerwear of an institution in motion.
But the feel of the place was entirely minimal. The ceiling was low, confining, rather than magnanimous like the hall of a public building. There was none of the wood paneling, the polished marble, or other architectural features that spoke of institutional power. Instead, the trimming was in stainless steel, glass, and shining white polyvinyl. Instead of stone or tile flooring, there was spun-polyester carpet, in off-grey and black pinstripes, like the reception area was wearing a suit of its own.
It did not seem right somehow. Buildings were meant as gathering places for executives and employees, not meant to be one of them. Across the carpet their heels did not click, but were muffled, matching the hushed air from the HVAC system as if this bright space demanded silent apprehension, rather than cavernous awe.
Once they were cleared by the receptionist to go to their false appointment and given visitor's badges, they proceeded down the hallway to the elevator bank. There was no artwork on the walls. In any other building there might have hung photographs, paintings, or even marketing material. Here were only the smooth, polished surfaces of the architecture. As they waited for the elevator, Mackey commented on it to Tikhonov. "Maybe they haven't accomplished anything worth sharing yet." He shrugged. "Or nothing that they want to share."
They were directed to ascend to the second floor. But upon entering the elevator, Mackey saw that there were four sub-floors, and decided to do what he thought Hopper might have done. He pressed the button for the second lowest, and the elevator began descending.
"Did you see the layout of the building?" Tikhonov murmured. "It intersects a hillside. I would bet that on the extent of the building, the sub-basements emerge from the hillside."
"That would be a good place to remove aircraft from a lab or underground hangar," Mackey said.
The exited the elevator and walked quickly down a long hall, decorated in the same minimal style as the lobby several floors up.
"I can't believe they did the entire building out like this," Mackey commented, quietly. "Can you imagine working here? It feels like working in an empty closet."
"Your office—it's more comforting?"
Mackey wasn't quite sure what the Electromagnetic Bureau offered that Rand Aeronautical did not. "In public buildings, somehow, the chaos, the open spaces, even the older bits that need maintenance work—it reminds you of the public. That's what the world is like. You aren't cloistered from the world. You are part of the world you are building."
"And yet, you need a badge to get in. Your Bureau isn't a public library. The workers who build the equipment you design—they live, work, exist somewhere else, outside of your murals, atriums, labs, and large oak desks."
The offices were windowed, and they casually looked in as they passed, seeing workers at desks like any other office, albeit with a much more corporate color scheme. At least the work appeared the same, judging from the stacks of forms on desks, the boxes and filing bins stacked with paperwork, and the heads bent down over typewriters and drafting boards.
The offices gave way to larger doors, secured with security consoles. These must be the labs. To Mackey's surprise, the doorways were labeled with the name of what was contained within. They passed "Avionics," "Modeling," "Radar Cross-Sectioning," and "Materials." Would they simply find one that read "Drones"?
Tikhonov stopped in front of a pair of unlabeled double doors at the end of the hall.
"I have a good feeling about this one." He pointed.
Mackey gestured at the security console. "Do you have a good feeling about that?"
Tikhonov leaned his head close, scratching his chin. He felt around the outside edge with the tips of his fingers. Then suddenly, he stepped back, reared up, and planted a heavy kick in the meeting place between the two doors. They popped open with a crash. Mackey waited for the alarm, and heard nothing.
"Not even centrally wired," he marveled as they rushed inside. "Should have spent less money on carpet."
The room was not empty. Two technicians were behind a computer console, sitting on stools. They looked confused as the two men rushed at them. "What is the meaning of this?" one tried to ask.
"It's a sales pitch," Tikhonov responded quickly, producing the dazzle pistol from under his coat. Mackey suddenly remembered that they were armed, and wondered if he ought to have his weapon out as well. But it seemed as if Tikhonov had the surprised technicians covered well enough.
"Close the door," Tikhonov said to Mackey, "and find something to tie them up with."
He found some electrical cable and began doing the best job he could.
"What is it that you want?" one of the technicians asked, frightened.
"We want to see your drones," Tikhonov said.
"Why do you want to see our drones?" one technician asked.
"Shut up, Smith!" the other fired back.
"Well, apparently we've come to the right place," Mackey remarked, finishing securing each technician's hands behind their backs, and to the lab stools on which they sat.
"So." Tikhonov smiled, bringing the dazzle pistol closer to each of them in turn. "Where can we find these drones?"
They looked at each other. The one called Smith spoke first. "Well, it's not as if they won't find it, Habert."
"Because you clued them into it, you idiot!"
There was another set of doors in the back of the lab, and Mackey went to it. It seemed an obvious first guess. He opened one of the steel doors and peeked through. Looking back to Tikhonov, he waved him over. Making an obvious gesture towards the technicians with the dazzle pistol, Tikhonov walked back to the doors and stepped through.
It was one of the white drones, hung in a steel test rig suspended from the high ceiling, extending upwards some thirty feet in the air. Below it, on a test track extending the length of the long chamber, probably close to one hundred yards, was a P-car. The two men ventured forward to the control console at the side of the cavernous test space.
"Well, that was easy enough," Tikhonov murmured.
"Are they going to be okay in there?" Mackey gestured back towards the two technicians in the lab. "I'm not comfortable with the idea of having prisoners."
"They'll be okay if you tied those knots well enough. Beats being hit with one of these strange dazzle guns, I'm sure."
Mackey sat down at the console and began assessing the equipment. It appeared to be a test track control system, obviously enough. There were large buttons for power-up, emergency brakes, sequence countdown, and so forth. The computer console seemed equipped to run any number of routines. And then there was a stack of familiar-looking equipment, lined with grey scopes screens, plastic knobs, and output ports for Postal Standard RS-232 data cables. These devices would not have been out of place in Mackey's own laboratory.
"That's spectrographic test equipment connected to the computer," he told Tikhonov. "They were testing the jamming pods here, or some other radio function."
"Can you see how it is calibrated? To get any sense of the target for the jamming, or any other information?"
Mackey turned on the monitor set into the console, and pulled over a text entry keyboard. He wasn't sure of the computer's make, but a few attempts told him that there was a command-line interpreter running that appeared to function using a language not unlike FORTRAN. It was quite high-end, integrated with display and keyboard. He typed commands in line form, and the computer took his line of keystrokes and ran them without even
having to compile first. After stumbling through a few commands, unable to check his typing before hitting the "run" button, he managed to get a few datasets on the screen. He wished the system was more like the terminal at NATSB for Eliza, where Dr. Willamette had been able to see her keystrokes appear on the screen as she typed. Those two interfaces combined would be one hell of a engineering platform.
"I don't know this system, but let me see what I can do."
Thinking of the lab back at the Electromagnetic Bureau, Mackey tried to imagine what sort of information might be accessible via this terminal. One thing test platforms always did was log the experimental data to a recording medium.
Without context, the responses to his garbled commands didn't tell him much, but it confirmed that this system had been testing the jamming equipment.
"See these? They are spectrographic plots over time or distance—not sure which. This here, these lines? That must be the jamming signal. It's wide band, blocky, and strong, like it's meant to knock any other signal off the map. And look at this—these holes here? That's band jumping. If you wanted to avoid our interference detection systems, that would be a good start."
"I don't get it," Tikhonov said, "but I'm glad you do."
"Okay, this must be the test cycle. It looks to be about ten seconds long, whatever it was."
Tikhonov leaned close, over his shoulder. "Keep gesturing at the screen while you talk, it makes you look very smart." He gave Mackey a grin.
Orthogonal Procedures Page 21
