Solstice

by David Hewson

  Katayama pulled out a sheet of paper. 'I'd been thinking much the same way. I got some pre-programmed routes they can follow, vehicles lined up, air tickets, train tickets for when the transportation gets back to normal. They know what to do. Spread the word.'

  Charley almost laughed. 'They don't need to spread the word, Joe. We're not evangelists. You don't understand.'

  Some small fire lit behind his eyes, and Charley thought: He has a temper; it just stays beneath the surface most of the time.

  'No,' he replied, face hard and expressionless, 'I guess I don't. I thought that, when it was over, when we'd dispersed, that was what we did next. Pointed the way.'

  She did laugh then, just to see if she could get a response, but the flat Oriental face stayed unmoved. 'Meet the new boss. Just like the old boss. I don't think so. We've done our teaching. We can help. People can advise, point the way if it's needed. That's not why we're here.'

  'Why is that?'

  'To cleanse,' she said softly. 'To purify. The way a farmer burns the stubble at the end of the harvest. The way an artist scrubs a canvas when a painting goes wrong. There's a god in all this, Joe, don't forget that. Not a god that lives in the sky with some long white beard and a list of commandments. The god inside us. All of us, every living creature. And when we purify, that god comes out. She doesn't need our help. It happens. Even though they'll get their TV stations back on the air before long. Even though their armies don't go away. The real revolution starts in the heart, when we start to see the world around us for what it is: chaotic and fragile, ruined by our own endeavours.'

  'You put a lot of trust in people,' Katayama said.

  'No,' Charley said swiftly. 'I put a lot of trust in my god. Let's get moving, Joe. Start to thin the ranks.' She pushed her chair across the room and touched the arm of someone punching away at a keyboard. He stopped, beamed at her. 'How goes it, Sam?'

  'Like a dream,' he said in a monotone English accent. Heads turned, faces smiling. No need for concern, she thought. The Children were a family, would always remain a family, even when they'd dispersed. There was peace in the room, in spite of the heat that seeped in from the windows, rose from the humming terminals, enveloped them all. Peace and a resolve to see this through. 'Good,' she said.

  Against her instincts, she had spent time learning the workings of the financial markets. It was necessary to understand what you sought to destroy. Sam Lambert had been pivotal in this. A former English stockbroker who had quit his job to work for a venture capital company in Palo Alto, he knew so much about the way this digital flow of capital worked, moving around the world in some obscene impersonation of the sun itself, twenty-four hours a day, never resting, never failing — until now.

  The markets were like flowers, blooming for the sun. When the earth revolved and placed them in daylight, they opened their petals, let the life flood into them, raced and ran through the bright, waking hours. Then, eight hectic hours later, they felt the day start to grow darker and chill, wound down to sleep. And as one bloom closed, another one opened, following the daily circling of the sun's light upon the earth. It was a permanent, unchanging process, one that had been established decades before. What made it different now was the technology that threw an invisible electronic thread between each of those points on the globe, made it possible to trade in Tokyo from a desk in London.

  This changed the nature of the exercise entirely, linked every part to the whole. To make a trade in London, however small, however local, was to throw a pebble into the gigantic pool of international capital that swilled around the world, taking little heed of governments and currency restrictions, circumventing them by some quicksilver body swerve that got you where you wanted by some other route. It might add a few milliseconds to the transaction, taking you through some cabling in Panama or Cayman instead of Berne or Bonn. But you got there. Everything got there, pretty much.

  This digital nervous system was the financial world. And without it, Charley had come to realize, the complex fabric of modern money was merely a blank and empty page, a tabula rasa demanding something be written upon it, with precious little there to use as ink.

  'See how it's moving,' Lambert said, as much to the rest of the room as to the figure in the wheelchair. Tokyo had closed well down, not disastrously so, but enough to give the Western markets, which had to follow the game, sufficient jitters for a few nervous stomachs. Sydney and Hong Kong had drifted to a close along much the same lines. There were minor markets in Western Europe that opened before London. But no one was in any doubt about where the big players lay. The way the world was structured, London had the job of defending this game, until New York chipped in halfway through, opening the day as the sun rose over Manhattan.

  Charley Pascal sipped a camomile tea and watched the way thing were being sold, not heavily, just at a measured rate, just out of caution. Then, with no emotion in her voice, asked, 'Sam. Take a look at Zurich, will you? Tell me what you think.' And before he could answer, added, 'No. Before you reply, take a look at Amsterdam too.'

  Lambert started hammering the keyboard, staring fixedly into the screen. 'Unbelievable,' he said.

  The numbers on the screen were, literally, incredible. They represented the largest and fastest fall on the smaller exchanges he had ever seen. Not just Amsterdam and Zurich. In Paris and Frankfurt and Brussels the local index was tumbling through the floor. Across the world in Singapore, which thought it was heading for a quiet close with only a little backdraught from what had happened in Tokyo, the Straits index was now plummeting too. It was as if they had all walked to the edge of the cliff, then jumped. And any minute now they would take the Footsie with them.

  'Look at the money markets,' Charley said. Lambert switched the table onto the screen. It was the same old story. People rushing to the dollar, the mark, and the yen, even gold, hunting for security and letting everything they perceived to be weak collapse behind them. The pound was in freefall, already pushing par with the dollar. The Euro followed suit, plummeting to new lows.

  This was the biggest market in the history of the world. It spanned the globe and ran through fibre-optic cables and geostationary satellites, it pulsed twenty-four hours of the day. And it behaved with the same mute, unchanging instinct of a herd of beasts. There was a name for this, and it was one that Charley, as she had watched the markets these last few months, had come to understand. It was a depressive supercycle, of the kind that was around in all the great crashes, in '87 and 1929 too if someone had known how to recognize it. And all it needed to push the supercycle over the edge into complete economic collapse was a little help.

  'What's the state of the storm, Louise?' Charley asked a blonde girl at the next terminal.

  'Coming up good. As good as we've seen.'

  'This is just nervousness, Sam,' Charley said. 'That's right, isn't it? Nothing we've done?'

  'The nervousness is caused by our presence,' Lambert replied. 'But you're right, the systems are running pretty well in themselves. There's some disruption from the solar activity, but it's not a cause in its own right, we haven't fed any disruptive data into the Net.'

  Charley Pascal leaned back in her wheelchair, closed her eyes, felt ecstatic. 'Open the gates, Louise,' she said quietly. 'Not all the way. Just enough to throw a wrench in the works. No fire. Not yet.'

  'Done.' The girl was smiling. They were all smiling. Twenty or more people in the room, waiting, the keyboards silent for once.

  Charley Pascal closed her eyes and tried to imagine what was happening in space at that moment, tried to feel the way this tiny slice of that gigantic sea of energy flowing through the universe was being channelled toward the earth.

  'Well?' She lifted up her head and looked at Lambert. A small crowd was gathering around his terminal; she could hear the fast, hot chatter of their excitement. Sam Lambert's face was a picture: half-glee, half-horror. There was still the thrill of the trader there, even after all these years. It was Like jumping from a p
lane without checking if there was a parachute on your back, she guessed. Or Russian roulette.

  The lights shifted and flickered on the monitor. It was Singapore that went first, taking down the overnight trading lines that still ran after the market close. One moment the figures were on the screen, with some frantic agency copy underneath them. The next they were gone. No 'network down' announcement. Nothing.

  Moscow was the next to fall. In exactly the same way, twenty seconds later. Zurich followed and shortly afterwards Frankfurt. Then, so quickly it seemed to happen simultaneously, Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels. The panels on the monitor that should have carried a miniature stock chart were empty, just black voids, while the live part that remained, the London market, and the prospects for Wall Street, whose turn it was next in the game, just raced and ran and screamed at them.

  The stock screens went blank. The Children watched, waiting breathlessly, to see if something would return. Finally, Charley spoke. 'What do they do now, Sam? What are their options?'

  'I don't know. They must have contingency plans for this. They can keep the markets closed on a temporary basis.'

  'Good. But what does that mean? For these people? For this old order of things?'

  He tried to imagine. 'They can rebuild. They can suspend trading until they are happy they can control things.'

  'But this is capitalism,' she said. 'This is global capitalism, without frontiers. It feeds upon the ability to move money instantly, digitally, anywhere, at any time. And we are removing that nourishment, we are destroying the cogs and wheels of this particular machine that entraps, enslaves us all.'

  'I know,' he said.

  'So what happens?'

  'Collapse,' Sam Lambert said. 'Absolute, bloody chaos.'

  'The mother of us all.' Charley Pascal grinned and threw her arms around him.

  CHAPTER 32

  Martin Chalk

  Washington, 1232 UTC

  It didn't take long at all for an ID to come through. Forty minutes after the Bureau put the picture of the dead man on the internal net, the phone rang in the Pentagon bunker and Dan Fogerty started to smile, furiously taking notes all the time. A hurried conference was put together in a quarter of an hour. Tim Clarke was back at the head of the table, and this time, Helen Wagner thought to herself, the military men were starting to look energized. Targets.

  'We have a lead,' Fogerty said. 'The office in San Jose picked the guy up from missing persons. His name is Martin Chalk, age twenty-six. Used to be a postgrad student at Berkeley, something to do with quantum mechanics and fusion. Then a year ago he dropped out, joined the Children. His family complained to the local police station and then to us that he'd been kidnapped, brainwashed, the usual thing. He was living with the Children in some commune they had in San Francisco.'

  'Did you check it out?' Clarke asked.

  Fogerty looked uncomfortable. 'The local cops did that, sir. The guy was twenty-six. And very bright. He knew what he was doing. He was able to come and go as he wanted. There was no way they could intervene. This is a free country.'

  Clarke sighed and shook his head. 'You're sure about the ID?'

  'Oh yes, sir. Last year Chalk took part in some kind of ecoprotest on the Golden Gate Bridge. Climbing up the pillars and sitting there, holding up the traffic until the cops came and talked them down. He got fingerprinted after that. The records are still at the station. He was never charged, which is why we would have been a little slow to pick up on them through the main print database. But we double-checked. And we know that he moved on to San Diego, presumably to be near the Children, because there was still some correspondence after the arrest, when they were thinking about whether to prosecute. This is the man.'

  Clarke surveyed them all and Helen was astonished. There was a smile on his face, and this was such a rare thing it made all of them, even the Agency people, feel rewarded. 'That's great work, Dan. We can work with this. We can do something. General Barksdale?'

  'It has to be somewhere near Vegas,' Barksdale replied. 'We need to start putting people in place right now.'

  Clarke nodded. 'Right, we need — '

  'Sir?' Even the President was staring at her as if this were an unwarranted interruption.

  'Miss Wagner?' Clarke looked coldly at her.

  'Are we asking ourselves enough questions about this? We don't know why this man was in Vegas in the first place. We don't know what drove him to talk to that woman in the casino or kill himself.'

  'This isn't your field, Wagner.' Levine scowled. 'If you'd got as many years in Operations under your belt as some of us around this table, you'd know that the simplest explanation is always the best. People are a lot less smart than we think.'

  'So,' she continued, 'what we are being asked to accept is that this man somehow left the Children, made his way to Vegas — how we don't know — issued this warning, and then, for some reason, killed himself.'

  'It doesn't sound so implausible, really.' Fogerty smiled.

  'No? And he just happens to be someone that we can identify so easily? Someone who has prints? A police record?

  It seems to me that if they wanted to give us a sign, if they wanted to lead us in the wrong direction, this is one great way of doing it.'

  'That's bull,' Levine said.

  'Not necessarily.' To Helen's astonishment it was Fogerty who came to the rescue. 'There's a possibility this is some kind of game. Or it could be something genuine. We just don't know. But what we do know is that it's the best — in fact the only — lead we have. Even if this is some elaborate kind of trick, we may still be able to pick something up from it. We now, at least, have a chance of narrowing down our focus. You can't expect us to dismiss that.'

  'No,' she answered, thinking. 'I agree.'

  'The important thing is to be ready,' Fogerty continued. 'We need to have a high-level team in place when we need them — and I'm not leaving this to anyone local. We're going to have to ship them in, and that's going to take… how long, Jim?'

  A thickset man in a USAF uniform looked at his watch and said, 'We can have a team on the ground within five hours of departure. There's no civilian air traffic today because of the emergency. We can take you straight in to the domestic airfield in Vegas. I'll position helicopters there that will enable us to go on to pretty much anywhere in the vicinity in the space of an hour or so once you give us the target.'

  'Right, Miss Wagner? Are you any closer to locating this target through reconnaissance?' Clarke asked.

  'We're looking, sir,' she answered. 'We need to do some reprogramming. It won't begin in earnest for another three hours or so. That's as tight as I can push it.'

  'Push it tighter,' Clarke said. 'And hell, the bottom line is simple, surely. This guy is the one proven link with the Children we've got. Do you people have any more about to pop out of the woodwork?'

  No one spoke. 'Well, then, there you are. If something better comes in — and I don't see much hope of that written on your faces — we have the resources to cope with it. In the meantime, prepare to get a team down to Vegas that can go in, take hold of these people when we find them, and secure whatever installation they have there intact. Intact! Do I make myself plain?'

  They all nodded.

  'I have to go along,' Helen said. 'I need three or four people from my team with me.'

  'No,' Barnside grunted, 'if anyone goes along from the Agency it's someone from the operational side.'

  She blinked. 'We are going to have to take control of whatever equipment they have down there, and do it quickly. I don't want to risk trying that down the line. I've got MIS people who are going to be essential. But I need to be there.'

  Clarke looked at her. 'I take your point. But what about the imaging? I don't want you sitting on the asphalt in Vegas if it means any slippage there.'

  'We have an excellent team chasing that, sir. I can breathe down their necks as easily from Vegas as I can sitting in a bunker here.'

  'You make a goo
d case,' Clarke said. 'Organize your people. Take whoever you want.'

  'Sir,' Barnside said testily, 'we can't have Agency staff out in the field without an Operations presence. If you're agreeable I'll accompany Assistant Director Wagner.'

  'This is an FBI operation, Dave,' Dan Fogerty pointed out slowly. 'Remember our orders. No range wars here.'

  'Guaranteed.'

  'You're happy with that?' Clarke asked.

  Fogerty nodded. 'Sure. Provided we all know where the chain of command lies.'

  'It lies with me, Dan,' Clarke said. 'Ultimately. And let's not forget the purpose of this. At the risk of repeating myself, gentlemen, we need this installation in good working shape and, if possible, these people alive. The Shuttle can't be our only option. Understood?'

  The door to the bunker opened and Graeme Burnley walked in, face taut with trepidation, a couple of sheets of paper in his hand.

  'Good.' Clarke got up from his chair, not waiting for them to answer. He looked tired, Helen thought. He looked impatient, and that was dangerous in any leader. 'By my watch you'll probably be getting into Vegas towards midday local. Let's see if we can get this thing wrapped up by the end of the afternoon. And then get back to some nice easy problems, like running the country. And burying Bill Rollin-son. Until we do that, nothing starts to get back to normal.'

  They watched him go. When the door closed, Ben Levine grunted, 'The little guy looked like he'd eaten a frog. I wonder what the hell was wrong with him.'

  Fogerty watched them from across the table, and Helen was struck, not for the first time, by the contrast between the two: both relics of the previous administration, one an old pro, risen through the ranks, the other someone who crossed over from academia and, to an extent, never ceased to treat this as an intellectual exercise.

  'You should get yourself one of these new smart pagers,' Fogerty said, pulling something out from his jacket pocket. 'This damn thing was twitching like crazy all through that little conversation we just had.'