A Times photographer had shot a profile capture of Hodgson. The photographer had fired off a six-shot burst of images in rapid succession, and I could see the animation forming in freeze-frame across each image file. A small puff of smoke coming from a skull grew larger in each successive image, then disappeared. Hodgson was Kristoff. Kaften had questioned me about Hodsgon, then about Jaime, asking me what I really knew about the man. I realized I knew far less than I had thought, but I was satisfied I had found what I was looking for.
I stared at the faces again, noticing more similarities between Hodgson and Kristoff. The rest were strangers united in a common cause. At the center of the Berkeley massacre’s map was a small regiment of men from the US Army.
The most heavily populated data points at the outlying rings were college students. Most were anti-war protestors, but other grassroots organizations had joined the coalition to express anti-violence, anti-corporate greed, plain old anti-business, anti-technology, anti-military, and anti-nano-everything viewpoints. The gathering had grown into a large demonstration for a multitude of voices, but most of the people in the crowd had been nothing more than hangers-on needing a purpose. The groups had originally united to protest the US and Canadian governments’ policies of internment for Asians populating the Western Seaboard in the wake of PRC and PRC-sponsored terror attacks across North America.
Critics recalled the Japanese-American internment camps across the West Coast following the attacks on Pearl Harbor during World War II. The military had established exclusion zones across the entire Pacific Coast and rounded up anyone with Japanese ancestry and settled them in relocation camps. Based on the need to protect the country against espionage, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the executive order that had interned more than 100,000 people. The ruling had never been overturned.
Finding itself at war against Asian aggressors once again, the military had an easy claim for forced segregation. Lawyers and advocates spoke out against the targeted discrimination, but lower-level courts were powerless to overturn Supreme Court rulings. When the cases finally worked their way up to the higher levels, it was too late.
Soldiers from the Ninth Infantry Division deployed across the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, pushing through resistant crowds that booed and condemned them.
Rioting had broken out the night before, and explosions had rocked the Oxford Research Unit, the Haas Pavilion, and the Valley Life Sciences buildings. Students ransacked the Li Ka Shing Center’s stem cell research labs and destroyed as many tissue cultures and as much imaging equipment as they could. The research and nanofabrication labs housed inside Sutardja Dai Hall had not fared any better, and even the cyber café had been decimated. Rioters had taken sledgehammers to the walls and floors, stolen whatever they could carry, and started fires in the garbage cans. The entire campus from Walnut Street to Durant at the southern edge had turned into a disaster area. Students set their own housing complexes on fire and camped on the grounds, content to live like bums if they thought it would send a message to the higher-ups.
The Ninth ID set up snipers in the carillon of Sather Tower, three hundred feet above the expansive campus. When things got rough for the ground-level troops, the bird’s-eye snipers were able to precisely fire high-velocity rounds into the crowds. They took a lot of lives that day, but few regarded them as heroes in the days and weeks that followed.
UC Berkeley had many foreign students. PRC citizens and second-generation PacRim-Americans accounted for more than half of the university’s enrollment. The military had orders to detain all 16,000-plus students for questioning, which consisted of a long series of loyalty questions, interrogations, and intensive background checks. Nearly all of them were relocated to detention centers in Kansas, Arkansas, Montana, Texas, and New Jersey.
In a show of solidarity, many student unions banded together to harbor fellow PacRim students and oppose the military. The initial protests on campus had been organized by the Stop the War Coalition, which was known for its attempts to remove military recruiters from the campus and its regular anti-war and anti-discrimination protests. Several members of the group had also been arrested early on for attempting to provoke violence against the police and National Guard.
Many of the PacRim students had turned to the Doe Memorial and Bancroft Libraries for shelter, near the Memorial Glade green zone. A thick concentration of protestors had gathered at the Glade, thousands of students holding signs and banners bemoaning the evils of American capitalism, corporatism, and militarism. They burned effigies of the President and dolls dressed in military uniforms. They set the American flag on fire and cheered and danced around the burning embers. They were loud in their persistent shouts, their voices filled with hatred and anger toward the men and women in uniform.
“Fuck you,” they yelled, throwing their fists into the air as the Ninth ID set up a line to oppose them.
The squad commander attempted to give instructions and orders, but the crowd of protestors shouted over him, drowning out his words. They yelled for America to die and for these fascist pigs to get off their campus. Tempers flared and raged, and the shouts and voices quickly turned to action. Bottles were thrown, first plastic, then glass. Bricks and chunks of concrete followed.
The soldiers were dressed for crowd control and had come prepared for the riots. A line of men stood behind thick, clear shields, watching the violence unfold through toughened smart-glass helmet visors equipped with enhanced retinal displays. They held up well against the antagonizing forces, and the squad commander tried repeatedly to calm the protestors, giving them numerous warning to disperse. On the commander’s fifth attempt at reasoning with the crowd, a beer bottle flung at his head shattered against his helmet. A piece of glass cut his cheek, and he decided then that the time for reasoning was over. The crowd was growing restless, and the violence was clearly escalating.
Armed with high-pressure hoses, they shot powerful jets of water into the crowd. They lobbed canisters of tear gas into the center of Memorial Glade, but a few protesters had been wise enough to bring masks, and they refused to be cowed. Those who had been blasted with the hoses found their feet again and charged forward, angry and hurt. Rubber bullets put down a few. Protestors from other sites around the campus struck up their own agitations, and numerous melees reached from one end of Berkeley to the other as the crowds lashed out against anybody in uniform—military, police, and even campus safety.
Any notion of crowd control went out the window almost as soon as Army soldiers set foot on the Glade. The mob assaulted their front lines, and the violence grew congested and bloody in short order. Someone, somewhere, threw a Molotov cocktail into the thick of it, and flames lashed out against soldiers and protestors. More Molotovs lit the air, and Hodgson screamed as his sleeves and combat gloves caught fire. He dropped and rolled in the grass to smother the flames. A young girl rushed up to him and kicked him in the face. Then she stabbed him with a large shard of glass she had in her hand.
Hodgson was dazed, on his back, smoke curling up from his arm. She straddled him and jammed the chunk of glass beneath the safety visor, into his skin, and yanked brutally. She tore open his face, gouging a thick trail down his cheek and jaw. He screamed and punched her, hard. She fell off him, her nose broken, both lips split open. He rolled and got his knees and hands under himself. Blood rushed down his face and into the grass. It took him a few moments to collect himself and find the strength to stand up. The medichines were already stitching his face back together, but I knew it wouldn’t heal properly—it would leave a long, ropey scar as a reminder of that day. By the time he was on his feet, she was gone, off to find somebody else to attack.
The soldiers had been instructed to use rubber munitions, but at some point during the confrontation, they had switched back to standard steel-jacketed, armor-piercing rounds. Even though some of the college kids had thought to bring their own gas masks, not a single one of them wore anything
more protective than blue jeans and T-shirts.
Whether the change in ammunition was an order passed down the chain of command or simply groupthink seizing control of the armed forces had never been clarified. The few after-action reports that had been made public—or rather, that had been unearthed by a small group of investigative journalists—all indicated that the soldiers hadn’t been consciously aware of switching over to lethal ammo. Considering the hectic state of affairs and the stress of combat, I tended to believe them. Instinct and rote maneuvers took over, and in the heat of the moment, any filled ammo magazine was a good one, even the wrong type.
I watched Hodgson eject a magazine and drive in a new one. The wound on his face had reopened, but the blood flow was minimal. Pebbles of glass caught in the fabric of his combat fatigues glittered in the dying daylight. The sun set to the echoes of gunfire and screams, and the night held the promise of more violence. Streetlights had been broken or shot out. Dancing flames of burning trash and cars and from dorm rooms set ablaze by vandals illuminated the campus.
The uniforms fought to subdue the protestors, and dead bodies lay in the memorial pool, turning the water a dark crimson that was almost black in the dusk. Corpses, mostly protestors as well as a handful of policemen and soldiers, littered the campus. Their blood had made thick puddles of the mud and stained the grass of Memorial Glade red.
Weariness seized the crowd and the soldiers. The fight had gone out of nearly everybody, but a few protestors were perpetually belligerent. They were shot down quickly, lest they inspire others.
For a moment, everything was still, as if the world were on the edge of a gasp. Weariness turned into exhaustion. The rioters gave up, their faces screwed up with confusion and defeat. Police and Guardsman ordered everyone down to the ground then went about the business of handcuffing them. Children’s faces shifted and hollowed as they realized they were not quite adults prepared for the harshness of reality. Whatever light had been in their eyes before the battle was extinguished.
The military separated the Asians and tagged them for the camps. The others went to jail. The Ninth ID regrouped and prepared to storm Doe Memorial Library. With the ground secured, helicopters flew in, and soldiers rappelled down and through the library skylights while the ground-level troops hustled up the stairs and breached the main entrance.
Beneath the library was the Gardner Collection, a four-story underground structure that housed the University’s collection of three million volumes. Fifty-two miles of bookshelves filled the space, and a subterranean hallway connected the Doe and Moffitt Libraries. Inflatable mattresses, blankets, pillows, backpacks, propane lanterns, and table-top grills, along with assortments of canned goods and packets of dried meat, were scattered between the aisles of books. Sleeping bags were arranged atop study tables. The foreign students had made the tunnels and stacks their temporary home while waiting for the war to end so they could resume their lives and their studies.
They watched with wide eyes as the military descended upon them. They were frightened and confused. Some didn’t even speak English well and did not understand the orders being issued to them.
Soldiers tore away bedsheets, yanked off pillowcases, and kicked over mattresses. The soldiers rummaged through bags, dumping their contents on the floor, spilling papers, pencils, pens, calculators, and textbooks. They examined the food, carelessly tossing it aside. They were on the hunt for weapons or anything that could be used as a weapon: knives, forks, and maybe spoons that had been sharpened to a point.
An older Asian man and his wife strode forward, their arms extended to either side of their bodies, protecting the cluster of students behind them as they stood before the soldiers. Both were getting up in years, and the man’s hair was gray. The woman had a bird-like fragility to her, although her eyes were diamond hard.
“Please,” he said. “They’ve done nothing wrong!”
Both were vaguely familiar. Their daughter had inherited her father’s eyes and nose and her mother’s mouth and the severe glare. Alice’s parents.
Hodgson pushed the woman away roughly. Clearly distraught at the sight of his wife being manhandled by the soldier, the man strode forward, but his reward was a punch to the ribs. He stumbled forward, and I could see Hodgson was quickly losing control.
“You must stop this,” the woman said. Her voice was stern, hardened from years of teaching, I guessed.
Hodgson was done fucking around. The last few hours had run him through the wringer, and he was clearly tired. Still, his eyes were calm and calculated as he raised his gun and shot her point-blank. The bullet entered below her right eye and punched through the back of her skull. Her blood splashed against her husband, and his mouth hung open in a perfect, disbelieving O. Then Hodgson turned the gun on him and fired.
None of the soldiers reacted, except to lift their guns. I watched groupthink prevail again as the soldiers opened fire on the huddled mass of students. Some ran between the stacks. Soldiers gave chase and gunned them down in the aisles. So scared that she was shouting in Chinese instead of English, one girl spun to confront the soldiers. She slipped on the loose sheets of paper and nearly lost her footing. She grabbed onto the bookshelf, dislodging a row of thin volumes and old bundles of paper lined with handwritten text. She regained her balance in time for a hail of bullets to send her down on her ass.
I watched as the soldier, emotionally disconnected from his action, backed away to regroup with the others as the girl’s chest slowly deflated with her dying breath.
I was fatigued and stank of flop sweat. Although what I had seen had been horrifying, a part of me was disappointed. I was used to feeling the rush of the DMT, and it had been ages since my last high. I missed it and struggled to push aside that neediness. I tried to figure out how Alice must have felt when she’d seen all this.
She looked at me expectantly, her lips slightly parted. She pushed forward in her chair. “Do you see now?”
I did. “Hodgson. That was Jaime… The burns, the scar—that had to be him.”
“He’s aged a lot since the war ended, don’t you think?”
“He must have played around with the nanos. Reversed them somehow to cause cellular decay so that he could look years older. He did a good job, too. Took me a few scans to key in on it.”
I thought about her relationship with Jaime and about the chiang job. It didn’t jibe, and that nagged at me. He was linked in, but aside from his own memories, any correlates were void. I didn’t have the energy to plug back in, but I thought maybe Alice and I were finally on the same page. I sat still for a long minute, thinking.
I’d gotten the chiang job through Jaime, but I knew Alice had used him as a middleman. She had wanted him dead, and Jaime had gone along with it. According to the convergence web, they were tangentially linked.
“Jaime doesn’t know you’re a memorialist.”
“No. Very few people do.”
“So you both wanted the general dead, but for different reasons.”
“General Yuan was born as a US citizen. He was at Berkeley during the time of the riots, in hiding in the basement of a residence hall with a few others. They were taken into detention and put in a relocation camp in Carlsbad. As part of his loyalty test, he was offered the chance to give up his citizenship, which he took. He was turned over to the PRC as part of a prisoner-exchange program when the war ended, part of the Northern Alliance’s effort toward peacekeeping and restoring stability to the region. The PRC was impressed that he had so willingly severed his ties with America that they offered him the option of enlisting and granted him a field commendation and promotion. The publicity stunt helped the PacRim ruling body turn him into a media darling.”
“The celebrity went to his head though, and he thought he could do anything. He had a penchant for whores, and he enjoyed hurting them. I couldn’t tolerate any such transgressions, and I certainly would not allow that type of behavior to be repeated by others.”
“So y
ou killed him to send a message to your other PRC clients,” I said.
She gave me a slight downward turn of her head, which I took for a nod.
“And Jaime?”
“And Jaime wanted the opportunity to be able to claim credit for the murder of a well-regarded and much-publicized official in his little guerrilla war.”
“He had no idea there was ever any intersection in their lives?” I asked.
“Even if he did, what were the odds that it would surface? Again, he had no idea I was a memorialist or of the work I was doing. Convergences are an incredibly complex tapestry. Sometimes, the data leads to important discoveries. Other times, less so.”
“Did you know they had converged?”
“No. This was one of those important, and surprising, discoveries. I wanted retribution against the chiang for his transgressions against an employee. Being a collector, I was naturally interested in his memories, but at no point did I suspect it was linked to other matters.”
“But you knew Jaime had been involved in the massacre before you hired me.”
“No,” she said. “With convergences…” She seemed to search for the best way to piece together her words. “Oftentimes, we have disparate events, occurrences that we believe are unrelated. On one end, I had the Berkeley massacre and a small web of convergences from the few memory stacks we were able to access. On another end were protest rallies, or maybe the events of an ordinary day in somebody who would go on to become a protestor there. Sometimes, it takes an intermediate, an outside source or occurrence, that links them and brings it all into focus. That’s how it was with the chiang. He was a linking point, but not central to the spoke.”
She paused again, collecting her thoughts. “I’ve had this map of the massacre for a long time now. I’d known about Hodgson, but not about Jaime, that they were one and the same. When I first met Jaime, I had felt a certain familiarity, but I did not know why. His cover story was plausible, and he was much older than Hodgson, so I dismissed any worries. Until recently, I’d had no reason to doubt him.”
Convergence Page 13
