Directive 51

by John Barnes

  “You mean if they practice safe machinery?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I was kind of hoping to maybe get rid of the wheel.”

  “Wheels let you raise clean water from depth, and clean water means healthy babies,” Zach said. “You can have my wheel when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”

  Jason liked to argue, and he was about to, but he felt that familiar, comforting internal hug, the reminder that you didn’t quibble about Daybreak matters. Take down the Big System and then work out how it was supposed to be after. He felt a surge of warm friendship toward Zach, and it was a while before they talked again.

  ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. KENNEBEC. SOUTH DAKOTA. 8:56 P.M. CST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.

  Marshalene was loving the drive across South Dakota. She’d pumped up some nice loops in a random feed so that the whole drive had been her favorite high points from her favorite songs, maybe two minutes of music over and over in random scramble. She wouldn’t make it back to B-town tonight, but she’d keep going till she was sleepy, and if she was up till morning, that would be okay; someplace some hotel would take her money to let her sleep for a while.

  She’d be over in fucking Iowa before she even had to think about refueling, pissing, and buying more munchies to keep her going till dawn or tired, whichever came first.

  Then this unholy screaming, grinding noise scared the piss out of her, and the car tried, all by itself, to run off to the right. She pulled it back onto the road but it wasn’t easy; in her remaining headlight (when had that other one gone out?) she saw a sign for an exit to County Road 19 and Kennebec. Kennebec reminded her of an East Coast name; it seemed like maybe there’d be someone there that got her when she talked.

  The passenger-side rear motor had to be what it was, she realized, just like that hippie mechanic dude said. Damn, he’d been good, just not good enough to save what was obviously a dying POS car. Better go into a town and get some help. She took the exit.

  Half a mile more, as that grinding noise built up, she was wondering if she’d reach Kennebec; it sounded like the left rear motor was going out too. She’d get it towed, first thing in the morning, from the motel parking lot, if she made it to a motel.

  She sort of did. The engine had turned itself off but tried to come back on as the battery snapped and banged, and the number on the screen went up and down too fast to read—a bad short, for sure. The starter cranked twice, a funny, screeching noise, and died, but here she was at the driveway of a boarded-up gas station next to the COUNTRYSIDE INN MOTEL VACANCY, so she coasted into it as far as she could, set the brake, and lugged her bag across the parking lot.

  The mean old lady behind the counter had the TV turned way up, and clearly didn’t want to talk to Marshalene, because the president or somebody, maybe the other guy, had been shot or was going to talk or something, but she got a room eventually, and when she got into it, it turned out her portable player was dead and all blobbed up with white stuff, so there was no music, and no gift shop to buy another player or any food within walking distance.

  Really, some days you could just fucking cry.

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 10:15 P.M. EST. OCTOBER 28.

  Heather convened the first meeting of Working Group Daybreak about six hours later than she had been asked to head it up; things had simply been too much of a mess for anyone to have spare moments and mindspace during the pursuit and fiery death of Air Force Two, and none of the other working groups had been meeting either. But Arnie Yang had made the trip over and found his way through security, and to her pleasant surprise, Noel Crittenden, who was rarely willing to attend any meeting that might go after five, had dragged himself away from his town house in Silver Spring and made the long trip in as well. “I might as well see some history since I’ve spent my life just knowing things about it,” he explained.

  Working Group Daybreak gathered around the conference table, almost everyone with coffee or tea because it seemed certain they’d be here all night.

  Edwards and Reynolds sat next to each other, working up a list of questions they wanted to ask; Heather fought down her paranoia and reminded herself that when she’d been in the FBI, she’d been trained to go into everything with a long list of questions, and anyway, the questions could hardly be anything but useful in the circumstances. Lenny Plekhanov and Nancy Telabanian were huddled over the document Arnie had just sent over, checking and rechecking graphs for his presentation, and messaging the analyst teams back at NSA, to make sure that Arnie’s claims were fully supported by their data; no one at NSA would ever completely trust any analysis that didn’t come from NSA, and worse yet, this analysis was just different enough from the math, semiotics, and cryptography they did in-house for them to distrust it. Firmly, Heather reminded herself that everyone preparing for the meeting was helping her, not spying on her.

  The man from Deep Black, who had said to just call him Steve, was quietly reading from his phone. Orders? Reports? Enertainment? It might be his Bible; he walked and stood in a military way but he wore a black suit that looked like a Mormon missionary’s or a small-town funeral director’s. Deep Black Steve contrasted with Colonel Green, who, despite her uniform, slumped like a college student in a dull lecture, rubbing her face with tiredness; military people, even very senior ones, often pulled strange schedules, and perhaps she’d been up too long even before the crisis broke.

  Arnie hurried in, the portfolio, briefcase, and papers hugged under one arm all on the verge of spilling and his laptop trailing a cord behind it.

  Heather fought down a smile; she often suspected that one thing Allie found attractive about Arnie was that she was a natural organizer and Arnie was work for more than one lifetime.

  As if to follow the thought, Allie herself came in after him, grabbing up some papers; if it hadn’t been so comical, Heather would have been peeved, since Allie was distinctly not invited, but then Cam came in.

  Allie said, “Heather, I’m taking the responsibility, Arnie found something vital, and we think Cam needs to hear about this right away. I’m sorry to rearrange your agenda when it’s been so tough—”

  Heather shrugged; what can anyone do when the universe has its thumb on the MAX CHAOS switch? “At least something important must be going on. Why don’t we all sit and let Arnie spit it out? If you don’t all know Dr. Arnold Yang, he’s the resident genius at OFTA, and he’s a statistical semiotician, which you could describe as doing what the pattern-recognition charlatans would be pretending to do if they were smart enough to understand it, except Arnie does it with math that would fry Einstein’s brain, and he can not only find things he’s not looking for, his methods can find things no one has ever seen before.”

  “That’s a gross oversimplification—”

  “Later, Arnie. What’d you find?”

  “We’ve got the intersection between Daybreak and the attack on Air Force Two. Clear as a bell—no pun intended, the connection doesn’t run through the Bell cell in Washington. Furthermore, we can be nearly sure it was deliberate right from the start, because on both the Daybreak side and il’Alb side, they did some pretty difficult, complex work to conceal the way they were coordinating with each other. That doesn’t happen by accident, so it’s no coincidence.”

  Edwards and Reynolds were leaning forward like leashed dogs smelling blood. Small wonder, Arnie’s offering them a chance to bust some butts and not feel helpless.

  “Here’s the link.” On the room’s screen, he brought up a Saw diagram, the circle-and-arrow graph with contours that let an experienced professional read message traffic within an organization at once. “Heavy relaying made it hard to see at first. Many Daybreak messages worked like chain letters or spam, re-encrypting without decrypting, just proliferating till the message reached the right person with the right keys, and launched its own killer to eliminate all its copies from the net. Wasteful, messy, ultimately it gave our side a lot to work with, but it was fast and easy for Daybreak to use,
and all the extra crap it generated meant it took us a long time to weed through all of it to see what was going on.

  “Once we disentangled all that, we found eleven sources in il’Alb il-Jihado that were all messaging one Daybreaker in Guerrero Negro, who went by ‘Aaron.’ In turn, he led a very weird AG that didn’t look like any other Daybreak AG—it was all individuals scattered physically within 200 miles of the flight path of Air Force Two over Baja and the Gulf. But they all seemed to believe he had a commune somewhere in the mountains above Guerrero Negro, and they were planning to flee there after carrying out missions.

  “We’ve got five of Aaron’s eight AG members identified. The first one, here, is Ysabel Roth—”

  “She shot down the airborne radar, or someone did from her apartment,” Reynolds interrupted. “Agents in Yuma got into there just about an hour ago. Can you give us—”

  “She’ll be fleeing toward Guerrero Negro, by some indirect route. Probably into Mexico and making things up after she gets there, she’s fluent in Spanish and can pass for Mexican.”

  Reynolds nodded, and said, “Excuse me,” then began ticking away on the keys of his laptop.

  Arnie said, “Let me run through the rest of the identified and then we’ll hit the non-identified. Peter Rapoch”—he brought up a slide—“released nanoswarm upwind of North Island NAS, so all those planes that were refueling or coming in and out of there are spreading the infection, and some of them may infect their home carriers when they return.”

  Colonel Green jumped to her computer to confirm that flights out of North Island were grounded.

  It went that way for the rest of the list, and Reynolds was able to identify one of Arnie’s unknowns with a suspect who had destroyed a microbiology lab at UCSD under the pretense that she was an animal-rights activist liberating the research monkeys. “But along with letting the monkeys out,” Reynolds said, “she took a bat, wrench, and split cord to exactly the gear and computers needed to identify new bacteria and funguses in Southern California’s coastal waters; she’s delayed the lab work by weeks. Then on her way out, she ‘accidentally’ went through the political science department, and ‘accidentally’ ran into Professor Constantine Elwein-Gonzalez, who was there because he was on conference call for some of our anti-terror work, was ‘startled,’ and shot him. Elwein-Gonzalez happens to be the American who was probably most knowledgeable about il’Alb il-Jihado and had actually met and interviewed some of them; it was a classic setup of ‘surprised an intruder,’ and we know il’Alb likes that particular cover and uses it often—it’s what they used when they murdered Pawhan. And the girl we’re looking for—her name is Jasmine Chin—matches with everything you know about Aaron Group Suspect Seven.”

  “Let me take a second and relay all files to Agent Reynolds’s computer,” Arnie said, typing.

  “So,” Edwards said, “between Daybreak and il’Alb il-Jihado, we’ve got cooperation both ways. Daybreak operatives took down assets that we’d need for coping with the hijacking, and they were provided with information that let them carry out Daybreak-type sabotage because they knew our military would be highly active at certain bases.”

  “That’s right,” Arnie said. “Most Daybreakers didn’t know that was going on, but then I suspect most il’Albis didn’t either. The great majority of messages from Daybreakers still online are screaming that the whole Air Force Two business was completely contrary to the principles of Daybreak.”

  Edwards looked up. “Sorry that it’s a world full of interruptions, but it is. Mr. Reynolds, I’ve got an e-mail from the Director; she has just authorized you to create a task force to round up the Aaron Group.”

  “Dr. Yang, will there be more about the Aaron Group?” Reynolds asked Arnie.

  “You’ve got all I had. Good hunting, and let me know where to keep you posted.”

  Reynolds was out the door in a blur. FBI Agent perspective: Nothing is really wrong as long as there’s someone specific out there for me to bring in, Heather thought.

  She said, “Well, now that the people who needed to get moving are moving, Arnie, give it to us, short and sweet. I’ll even let you say the words ‘system artifact,’ and hardly twitch at all—or now that you’ve got such a clear command structure in the analysis, is ‘system artifact’ even relevant?”

  “Well,” Arnie said, “the basic idea is that—”

  Reynolds stuck his head in the door. “Here’s an update: Ysabel Roth has been captured.”

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUERTO PENASCO. MEXICO. 8:25 P.M. MDT. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.

  I am one shitty spy and an embarrassingly bad terrorist. Even if Ysabel allowed herself a couple points for having carried out the mission and getting out of Yuma before anyone really started looking for her, she was doing one shitty job now.

  Because the bed-and-breakfast in Puerto Penasco was overbooked, they’d given her the “automatic overbook upgrade” and moved her into the Plaztatic Palace, as she mentally dubbed the Puerto Penasco Sheraton, and saddled her with a roommate—none other than Little Miss Scared Of Foreign Places.

  At least they’d given her a coupon good for a meal, but she hadn’t even thought of using that as an excuse to escape her unwanted roomie; instead, somehow, the earth-and-peasant-loving terrorist, scourge of the Big System, was now sitting over some bland noodle-veggie dish, trapped under the fake chandeliers in a plaztatic hotel restaurant, making polite conversation with Miss North Texas Loser Geek Girl.

  If Ysabel had just thought of a good excuse to bring her bag down here, just act like it wasn’t safe to leave my bag in the room, then fake one little interruption and scoot out the door with it, and I’d’ve been fine. So why didn’t I have this thought forty minutes ago?

  Back in the room exactly like the one you’d find in Cleveland or Tulsa, Ysabel said, “I saw more dirt in a day when I was three than this place sees in a year. Not exactly roughing it.”

  Nerd Chickie said, “I wish I had a tenth of your nerve, to just travel the way you do, and be right in there with the stuff. For me it’s—even when it’s just, like, Aspen, like, everywhere except home’s an exhibit, behind a glass wall.”

  Oh, fuckin’ gag me with a donkey dick, right now. “You need to get out more.”

  “Yeah, I guess I do.” Completely unironically, Nerdette turned on the TV and voice-commanded it: “American news.” She asked, “Were you going to do any of those organized activities tomorrow?”

  Inspiration! Ysabel said, “I’m planning to be up early and go out into town; more fun than ‘activities’ with a bunch of people I could have stayed home and found at the Senior Center.”

  The girl laughed and shoved her horn-rimmed glasses up her freckly nose. “We do seem to be the youth in the crowd, don’t we?”

  If she looked any more wholesome and innocent, Ysabel thought, I’d just sell her to a pimp for resale to a Japanese tourist with a rape-a-librarian fetish. Dammit, where’s a good pimp when you need one?

  But she said, “Yeah. So I’m going to turn in now and get up at dawn. It won’t be scary or dangerous or anything if you’d like to come along.”

  “That would be so awesome.”

  “Okay, so,” Ysabel said, “why don’t you grab first showers?”

  “Eahh, I kind of want to catch the news. You can.”

  It would look too weird to insist, so Ysabel shrugged. Anyway, it might be her last shower ever with unlimited hot water. She’d dress and take off while Little Miss Forgettable was in the shower. Nothing easier.

  Ysabel was just toweling off when she saw the doorknob start to turn slowly, soundlessly, most of the way around and then return to its normal position. She reached for the little lock button. The door slapped her arm back and the base of a lamp caught her under the jaw.

  Room spinning. Skull screaming like a bad smoke detector. What? She was—

  The girl jammed the lamp into Ysabel’s naked belly, knocking the wind out of her, and let it crash to the floor, slamming Ysabe
l’s foot. She grabbed Ysabel’s long hair, wrapped it in a fist that pressed against her neck, and forced her head back and down, dragging her backward by the hair into the main room.

  Ysabel’s feet slid and wobbled till she lost her balance completely and fell sideways on her ass on the hotel-room carpet.

  The girl punched her, hard, in the cheek. “Roll over.”

  She did. As she realized that the girl was tying her hands behind her back, she caught phrases from the American TV news: “believed to be,” “wanted for questioning,” and “Yuma.”

  Oh, crap, and because they were in this big American Plaztatic Tower of a hotel, there would be someone with good English at the front desk, who would take “I need the police right away” seriously.

  The carpet ground against her face, everything hurt, and the girl said, “Hey, is this one of those adventures you’re so patronizing about having had? You’re right, they’re fun.”

  ABOUT TEN MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 10:36 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.

  After all the excitement, Arnie was stuck, as ever, with giving his presentation at a time when it had to be an anticlimax. “Let’s start with what I usually do, okay? So you’ll see why it was I found what I found.

  “Semiotics is the study of how signs mean—how one thing stands for another or how a message connects to its meaning. Like an oncoming car flashes its lights at you on the highway, what do you know? Something wrong ahead, cop or accident or animals on the road, so you slow down and pay attention. Statistical semiotics is about how populations of signs function as signs. Like it’s close to night, or you’re close to a tunnel, and in the other lane you see ten cars in a row with their lights on, so you know it’s dark ahead, and you turn your lights on—and if other people do that, it becomes a message to other oncoming drivers.”

  “But they weren’t sending a message,” Heather said, playing the role to hurry Arnie to the point. “They just had their lights on, and you saw them.”