The Silicon Dagger

by Jack Williamson

  THE SILICON DAGGER

  JACK WILLIAMSON

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  THE SILICON DAGGER

  Copyright © 1999 by Jack Williamson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Design by Victoria Kuskowski Edited by James Frenkel A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue New York,

  NY 10010

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williamson, Jack.

  The silicon dagger / Jack Williamson.—1st ed. p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates Book.”

  ISBN 0-312-86540-6 I. Title

  PS3545.I557S55 1999

  813'.52—dc21 98-47006

  CIP

  First Edition: April 1999

  Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

  TO KATIE AND CHLOE,

  NEW CITIZENS OF THE INFORMATION AGE

  I WANT TO THANK MY EDITOR, JIM FRENKEL,

  FOR HIS LASTING FAITH

  AND ABLE AID.

  "BEWARE THE UNEXPECTED

  IT STRIKES FROM THE DARK."

  CHAPTER ONE

  AFTER ALDEN’S BURIAL the funeral limo took us back to the old Georgetown house. Marion, the children, and I. Beyond tears, Marion sat erect, bleakly staring straight ahead. Little Angela was in her lap, quietly sobbing. Beside me, Tim let his fingers creep into mine. To break the silence, I asked about his school.

  “A charter school,” he said. “I like it a lot.”

  He glanced up at his mother and back at me.

  “I think I’ll be a surgeon. Dad said I could be, if I tried hard enough.” He frowned. “If I could find the money. He said medical schools cost a lot.”

  “I’ll help you,” I told him. “If you try hard enough.”

  I felt his fingers tighten, and my own eyes blurred. Alden had been my half-brother, ten years older and almost a second father. Tim was only ten, less my nephew than a loyal kid brother. When the bomb exploded I had been away, hiking on the Appalachian Trail with college friends. Stunned by the news when we got home,

  I had not long ago begun to feel Tim’s loss, his mother’s and sister’s, their pain suddenly more real than my own.

  At the house, Marion stopped for a moment on the sidewalk, staring at the bed of roses that had been Alden’s latest hobby. I offered to take us all out for dinner, but the children wanted to stay home. While she was slicing cold roast for sandwiches, Tim led me upstairs to see his father’s office.

  Yellow tape was stretched across the room. The police had taken his laptop computer, but the big desktop machine lay mangled in the litter of books and papers under his shattered desk. A sheet was spread to cover the stains of his blood.

  “The cops and the FBI are coming back tomorrow to look for more clues.” Tim was very grave about it. “It was a plastic bomb, they say. Very hard to trace.”

  He caught my hand to lead me toward the tape.

  “Dad was working on the printouts from his laptop.” He gestured at the clean-swept floor around the sheet. “The pages were scattered everywhere. Mom picked them up, and the cops let her copy them before they took them away. But I don’t think—”

  He looked away to hide his tears, and spun the knob on the wall safe where Alden had kept his tax returns and the contracts with his publishers. Reaching inside, he found a worn brown leather wallet.

  “Dad—Dad’s.” He tried to steady his voice. “Mom wants to keep it just like it was. To remember him.”

  I gave it back, and he locked it in the safe.

  “The second bomb,” he said. “The cops say the bombers were maybe the same, but the explosive was different. I don’t—” His voice broke again. “I don’t think they found anything.”

  The first bomb, only weeks before, had brought down the Federal Building at Frankfort. The building was considered well secured, but evidence suggested that the plotters had smuggled the explosive a little at a time into a paint shop across the street behind it and used a curved barrier of sandbags and concrete blocks to focus the blast.

  “In a terrible way,” Alden had told me at the time, “it clinched my point that that home-grown terror is a major menace to the nation. Now my agent wants to make it the springboard for another infonet documentary. He’s calling it Terror: The Rising Wave. I don’t much like the title, but it should make another book and help spread the word.”

  We sat in the kitchen. Marion had made hot cocoa for the children. Angela went to sleep with half her sandwich still in her hand, and Marion carried her up to bed. Tim answered the phone.

  “Davey,” he told me. “I’m going over to his place to catch up my math homework. If you don’t mind.”

  He thanked me when I said I didn’t mind, and came to shake my hand before he left. Marion lit the gas log in the living room when she came down, and brought a half-bottle of leftover wine.

  Alden had found her on a Senate staff. My mother had called her plain. She wore glasses, and put her dark hair in a bun, but to him she had been beautiful. The kids adored her, and I ached for her now. When she and Alden were newly married, she used to tease me, calling me her baby brother. She still acted the elder sister, sometimes superior, but always kind and uncommonly wise. I loved and respected her enormously.

  “I’ve been terribly worried since his book came out.” I saw her pale lips set. “People who read it quit talking to him. Mad about what he’d said or afraid of what he might say. He’d had phone calls warning him to get out of Kentucky. He never admitted he was afraid, but I begged him not to go back.”

  She made a bitter face.

  “He said he had to.” She shrugged in wry resignation and looked into my eyes. “Alden had an old-fashioned love of his country. He said he saw a breakdown coming unless men of good will did something about it. He died for what he was trying to do.”

  She looked away to hide her eyes.

  “Even here—” Her voice broke, and she stopped to pour the wine. “Even here I’ve had wicked phone calls. The worst was from a man with a snarly voice and an odd accent. ‘Get the shit-sniffing wolf out of Kentucky, or we’ll be shipping him back in a box.’ ”

  The glasses trembled in her hand. She handed one to me. “Clay, you know Alden was never a wolf. Sometimes a lamb in wolf skin, maybe, but nobody had any decent right to hurt him.” She caught an unsteady breath. “I couldn’t stop him from going back, but we tried to cope. He asked the cops to watch the house. I drove Tim to school. But the bombers—”

  She flinched as if from actual pain.

  “Cowardly bastards! I saw the thing when it came in the mail. The wrapper was printed to look like something from his publisher. The cops have found a scrap of it that shows a Kentucky postmark. Not much—” She shook her head. “Not much hope.”

  She sat frowning at the gas log till I asked about her plans. “I’ll carry on.” She set her glass down on the coffee table and turned to me with a tight-lipped smile. “I always managed our finances. We’d saved some money. Alden had good insurance. I can keep the house. The kids need me here till Angela starts to school. I’ll go back to work then, maybe part-time at first. I’ve kept up connections. A job should be no problem. But later, when the kids are ready for college—”

  She bit her lip and turned to me. “Clay, I told the cops you’d been working in his office. They want
to see you in the morning.” “Not much I can tell them.” I sat groping dully through the emptiness of loss. “Alden kept his secrets, at least till he had them ready for print. The day he hired me for his research assistant, he told me not to ask too many questions.” I recalled his bleak little grimace and words I couldn’t repeat to Marion, not now. “Knowing too many answers could get you killed.”

  At the time I’d wondered if he only wanted to impress me, but now the recollection left me awkwardly silent till she asked about my own plans.

  “Alden had promised to help me go back to law school.” I had dropped out to take the research job with him. “Now I don’t know.” “You’re welcome here as long as you want to stay.” She gave me a pale smile. “But that’s about all—”

  She stopped, her voice quivering.

  “I’ll be okay.” I sipped the wine to thaw a lump in my throat, wishing for something I could do for her and the kids. A shock of hatred hit me, hatred for the makers of the bomb, hatred for all the other haters Alden had feared. “I have a few dollars in the bank. There’s financial aid if I do go back to school.”

  “It’s been a long day.” She set her empty glass on the table. “I’m going up.”

  I asked to see her copy of Alden’s laptop files.

  “They were on a disk he brought home from Kentucky,” she said. “Outlines for work in progress and notes on people he’d seen. Not many of them friendly. I had wicked phone calls while he was down there.”

  Her face twisted, she hugged me silently and went up the stairs.

  I carried the printouts to the little apartment behind the garage that had been my room since I was old enough to want one of my own. I loved that place. Alden’s artist-father had built it for a studio. His portraits of our mother and her parents still hung on the walls, along with an oak-framed photo of him standing beside them in front of the house.

  He had done his own parents, his father a sternly starched and bearded gentleman with a gold watch chain across his chest, his mother in the frills of the time, her eyes cast demurely down. And my mother again, done as a forest nymph, discreetly nude, save for a luminous halo. The old man had imagination.

  I sat down with the copied pages. They were raggedly marked where the blast had tom them, and splotched black with spatters of Alden’s blood. A few were missing, but Marion had put the rest in order. I was soon lost in what they told me.

  “Terror is a weapon,” he began. “A weapon of the few against the many. It attacks democracy and the freedom of speech by seizing the channels of information to turn those principles against themselves. By killing the innocent, it alienates those it was meant to sway, and so defeats itself. The worst of crimes, it must be countered. True information is our best defense against misinformation. I look for truth, a search that has earned me enemies.”

  The term “muck-raker” had angered Alden, though in another age he might have worn it proudly. An investigative journalist, he had spent his career probing for dirty little secrets people were trying to keep and being hated for it.

  “If nobody hates your story,” he once told me, “it isn’t news.”

  People enough had hated him for what he uncovered. The threats had begun with his infonet stories on anti-government dissidents: militant militias, religious extremists, hostile immigrants, unhappy special-interest factions, radical talk-show hosts and their converts. His book, Terror in America, summed up what he found.

  It had brought a storm of angry denials, but also a generous contract for a new series to run in print and on the global infonet. The publishers had promised him an audience of eighty million on the infonet, scattered over forty nations.

  “I’m going to call it Powderhouse or Promise, he told me. “I want to explore the springs of trouble and look for ways to make things better. I’ve picked out McAdam County for one typical social sample. Conflicts make news, and it’s sure got big conflicts!” Emotion had quickened his voice. “Kentucky has had battles forever, beginning with the Shawnees and Daniel Boone, and then families split by the Civil War. These days there are a bunch of conflicts: the Feds hunting pot farmers, and pot farmers sniping at them; wealth against poverty; gangs in the schools; crooks in high office, militias on the march; infocrats—the masters of information science—against the idle ignorant. It’s the nation on a microscope slide, playing out the story of our time.” His jaws went tight. “Refugees from a dead past, trapped in the information age and slow to learn what it takes to survive.”

  Alden’s head was angular and rugged under an untidy shag of black hair. Anger could put him into what Marion called his wolf skin. He wore it now, his lean face set hard and his black eyes shining.

  “I’ve seen trouble brewing nearly everywhere, but that county frightens me. Its habits of violence date from the time of the first settlers. The pioneers got there with not much except their guns and the Scotch-Irish sense of honor they defended in their duels and their feuds. Their old folkways die hard. A lot of people, baffled and frightened by change they can’t understand, their instinct is to fight. I heard lunatic hotheads quoting Jefferson and the Constitution, ranting for rebellion.

  “Yet the county’s still full of honest citizens.” Suddenly rueful, he let his voice fall. “Good people in church every Sunday, working hard, paying their taxes, listening skeptically to all the liars on the infonet, wondering who to blame for putting America on the road to hell. They need the truth about the information revolution, even the hard truth I told in Terror in America. ”

  Hot with a helpless rage against his killers, I read the files and read them again, searching for any clue that might reveal his killers. The last file was headed simply McAdam.

  “McAdam County,” it began. “A little America, with everything from illiterate aliens to a fine liberal arts college. Old Calvin McAdam brought his wife and his wagons and his cattle and his slaves over the Cumberland Gap and up the Wilderness Road two hundred years ago. His descendants were big wheels in the county for generations, though their fortunes have fallen now.

  “The current patriarch is Colin McAdam, a history professor till he retired. I found him in a white-columned Greek Revival mansion rebuilt rather shabbily after Civil War guerrillas burnt it to the ground. Though he’s no longer a power in the county, he’s still a gentleman. He served me a mint julep in a silver cup and showed me relics of the proud McAdam past. He’s tradition and the past.

  “He has two sons. Stuart is the black sheep. He organized the Kentucky Rifles, a local militia that’s itching for any kind of trouble. He’s in prison now on a narcotics charge. He’s almost a living symbol of today’s dilemmas.

  “His older brother, Rob Roy, is their hope for a brighter future. A computer wizard, he dropped out of college with a couple of his fellow nerds to write software. They’ve set up an outfit they call CyberSoft. Their star product is an encryption system that’s so secure the Justice Department is demanding a key.

  “There’s a daughter, Beth. Unmarried, she’s a loyal McAdam. Still lives at home and teaches some of her father’s history courses. I’ve asked to see her when she gets back from a summer in France, though she may not want to talk. The McAdams guard their privacy. Most of what I heard about them came from one Sam Katz, though I take him with a double pinch of salt.

  “He says the Katz clan came down through the Gap a year ahead of the first McAdams. Says his people claimed the best bottom land in the valley. Says the McAdamses murdered old Gideon Katz and ran his family off their homestead. The feud went on for three generations. Colin McAdam snorted when I asked about that. He called Katz a worthless shyster, and firmly closed the subject.

  “He is a lawyer. Perhaps he is a shyster; opinions seem to differ. I spent time with him because he knows county politics, but I never really understood him. He spoke freely about things past, but got nervous and clammed up when I tried to probe the here and now. He knows things he doesn’t want aired on the infonet. Things he seemed afraid to say.”

>   I went through the pages again, looking for answers. There were notes on a good many others who had willingly talked, and several who hadn't. Sheriff “Bull" Burleigh had ordered him out of the courthouse. The district attorney, Saul Hunn, advised him to get his dirty nose out of Kentucky. He had met Rocky Gottler, “the power behind Burleigh and Hunn.”

  I found a longer note.

  “Juan Diego Gottler. Bom in Argentina, son of a Kentucky horse breeder who went down there to raise Thoroughbreds on the pampas and married a local girl. The only horses, it turned out. were in the brochures he got up for investors here at home. He went bankrupt and disappeared.

  “Rocky's uncle raised him. Like Katz, he’s something of a mystery. He has money. I never learned where it comes from. He seldom shows it off. though he's president and principal owner of the Border State Bank. Uses his money to buy power. A big backer of Senator Madison Finn. I heard him referred to by various folks as the invisible king of McAdam County.

  “When I called him to ask for an interview, he took me out to lunch and a round of golf. He's dark, heavyset. and he talks very fast in a high-pitched voice with a very faint Spanish accent. I thought he was surprisingly cordial, considering what I'd written about him in Terror. Turns out he'd read it. and he wanted to talk about the information age.

  “ ’Your infocrats may be about to inherit the earth.' he told me. ‘But they don't scare me. Myself. I don't know scat about computers and your information age. but I do know who to hire. My uncle hired thugs to take out the pickets at his coal mines. I'll pick up your info experts when I need them.'