Sixty Days and Counting sitc-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  All that was very interesting; and maybe good, maybe bad, as far as any potential impact on their own operation was concerned. But there was no mechanism for bailing that Frank knew of, and all he could do was grit his teeth and wait for the time to arrive.

  Finally the hour came. He was in his office, his door was closed; he knew just how his FOG phone was bugged, and by whom. Time to play his part. He picked up the phone, dialed the number he had been given.

  Caroline picked up.

  “Hey,” Frank said.

  “Oh hey! What’s up? Why are you—”

  “I’ve got to see you, I’ve got the proof you wanted. Meet me down where we met before, by the river, about nine.”

  “Okay,” she said, and hung up.

  He stood. Took the Kevlar vest from his desktop and put it on. Kevlar. This was what Phil Chase had to deal with all the time. The feeling of being a potential target. Of having been shot and then going out there again.

  He left the White House compound, aware of just which one of the security guys at the gate had been tacking a new kind of chip on him. It had taken them a while to figure it out and get up to speed. The guard hadn’t been there all the time, but he had been there a lot, and they had made sure he was there now: thin face, impassive look, didn’t meet the eye quite. Do it again, asshole. This time they needed it.

  Once out on the sidewalk he put the earbuds of his iPod lookalike in his ears. “Did he do it?”

  “Yes,” he heard in his right ear.

  He walked west on G Street to the Watergate, then across the Rock Creek Parkway, through the Thompson boat club parking lot, where his VW van was parked; then past the van, over the little bridge crossing the creek, and onto the Georgetown waterfront. It was about eight-thirty.

  Then the city lost power. “Shit,” Frank said. The waterfront was now dark, and people were calling out and wandering in the sudden gloom.

  “This is bad,” he said.

  The voice in his right ear said, “—proceed for now. She says she can make it over no problem.”

  Frank went down to the water’s edge and watched the cars’ headlights make an uneven line on the Virginia side. George Washington Parkway, Arlington streets above. Generators were bringing light back here and there across the city, on both sides of the river.

  In this partial light Caroline appeared, looking flushed and intent. They met and hugged, then spoke like amateur actors, their voices extra-expressive—at times almost cutting each other off in their eagerness to say their lines. They rolled their eyes at each other, tried to pace themselves better. Two bad actors in the dark. He could see she was wearing the vest under her blouse, and thought her ex might be able to too. He handed her a little key-chain zip drive.

  Awkwardly he put his arm around her shoulder, and they rested at the river rail for a moment, itching at the unfelt transference of the new type of surveillance tick that had been lofted onto him by the security guard—a thing of plastic and quartz, pinging at a frequency the wands didn’t cover. A programmable mobile chip, programmed to jump on first contact and then stay put: a nano-event neither of them could feel except in the set of their muscles, a kind of itch on the inside of the skull.

  Together they hiked back over the little bridge, and stopped by Frank’s van. They embraced and drew apart, looking helplessly at each other, just barely visible to each other, and that only by the light of the passing cars on the parkway. This was a dark part of town even when the power was turned on. Frank let go of her hand and watched her walk away.

  Now she was walking in a crowd of Umberto and Wallace’s people, disguised as ordinary citizens and as tourists, which explained their daypacks and camera gear, their iPod earbuds, their aimless gawking and walking. It was a very professional team, far more expert than an ordinary SWAT team. Special ops—

  And yet.

  Frank hopped up in his van’s driver’s seat, prepared to be carjacked or shot; the presence of Umberto’s guys quietly sitting in the back of the van was little comfort. The blackout was a factor they had not planned on, it was dark out there and blackouts always induced a little chaos. Caroline was headed for the Watergate and then to the Kennedy Center. The special ops teams were going to follow her for as long as it took. They knew Cooper’s group had overheard the call from Frank, they knew Frank had been followed. Because they numbered almost everyone in the area, they were confident they would spot anyone approaching her with intent long before they neared her. At that point they would close in, and act in the same moment as any approach.

  Frank’s part in the cover story had had him passing along vital information, indeed proof of a crime, so he sat there uncomforted by his guards in back, expecting to be shot or blown up, but of course the van and the area were fully secured, and now one of the guards was wanding him with a bigger device than any he had seen before. Still a nanochip there on the back of his jacket. A tick, smaller than a tick. They would never find it in the fabric.

  “I’m going to leave that here and follow her,” Frank said.

  The man frowned.

  “Is there anyone following me?” Frank asked.

  “No,” the one in back said. “It looks like they’re just going for her.”

  “I’m going over there,” he said, and snatched the hand axe out of his jacket pocket and jumped back out into the dusk.

  “Stay out of the way.”

  He was still hearing the team comms in his right ear. Someone said her tick was now taking pings. Source not yet IDed. These devices had to be pinged from within a couple hundred yards. Frank started to run, dashing across Rock Creek Parkway during a too-small gap in the traffic, then racing across the black grass to Virginia Avenue, so much darker than usual, it was normally a very well-lit street. The headlights of passing vehicles destroyed night vision without illuminating much outside the road; they made things worse. Another voice complained that dense ping traffic in the area was making it difficult to identify sources; possibly there were decoys. Frank felt a stab of fear and ran harder still. Decoys? Had Caroline’s ex seen this ambush coming, and taken steps to circumvent it?

  It was hard to tell who was saying what. A police car with siren screaming zoomed through the momentarily still traffic. Some of the buildings with generators were lighting up. Frank said, “Can you patch me into her wire?”

  “Yeah.” There was a click, and then he could hear her whisper: “I’m going past the Watergate. I’m not sure what to do. It’s well-lit here.”

  “Stick to the plan,” someone said.

  “I just saw them,” she said. “I’m going to step into this espresso shop on the southeast side of the Watergate, they’ve got a generator going.”

  “Okay. Stay cool now. They won’t want any fuss.”

  Someone else said, “We have visual.”

  “On her or the tail?”

  “Both!”

  By now Frank was running as hard as he could around the northeastern curve of the Watergate complex, hand axe at the ready, thinking that a man hit by tasers might spasm so violently as to pull a trigger, or might shoot for the head on sight—

  Caroline was being escorted out the shop door by two men, one on each side of her, both holding her by the arm. Their backs were to him; Frank drew up short as he would have in the woods. Cooper was to her right, looking down at her, saying something though his jaw was set. Frank hefted the hand axe, grasped it like a skipping stone. “Come on guys,” he whispered.

  Then Cooper stopped and looked around, and began to pull something from his jacket. Figures leaped from the dark as Frank threw the stone over-hand. It was a perfect throw, but by the time it had flashed through the night to its target, Cooper had been flattened to the ground; the stone flew over him and his tacklers and hit one of the SWAT guys square in his flak-jacketed chest. The man’s rifle came up and pointed right at Frank, and three or four others did as well. For a moment everything froze; Frank found his hands were up over his head, palms out.

&
nbsp; No one shot him. Then fifty yards down the road a brief scrum erupted. Some of the rifles got redirected that way. Off to the side another sudden group coalesced out of the dark, men holding guns trained on a pair of other men. Finally everything went still.

  Caroline was stepping back gingerly from their own rescuers. She looked around, eyes wide; saw Frank. He came to her side and briefly they clasped hands, squeezed hard. She was white-faced, her gaze fixed on her trussed and prone ex as if on a beast that might still break free and leap at her.

  Umberto appeared before them, rotund in his flak jacket. “Into the Watergate,” he said. “We have one of the condos, and they’ve got their generator going.”

  -

  NEAR THE END OF THEIR DEBRIEFING, with Cooper and his crew long gone, and Umberto and his people absorbed in the progress of other parts of the root canal, Frank and Caroline realized they were no longer needed. Umberto noticed them standing there and waved them away. The operation was going well, he indicated. There would be no one left to bother them.

  As they were leaving, the man Frank had hit with his hand ax gave it back to him, frowning heavily as he thumped it into Frank’s palm. “You could hurt somebody,” he said. “Maybe leave it on your mantelpiece.”

  “On my dashboard,” Frank promised.

  They found themselves alone, standing outside the Watergate’s old hotel lobby entrance. The blackout was ongoing, although generators now lit many buildings in this part of town. Sirens in the distance sawed away at the night.

  “So you threw your rock at him again.”

  “Yes. I corrected for my release and almost got him.”

  “You could have wrecked everything.”

  “I know, but we’d gone off the plan. I didn’t want him to shoot you or get tasered and spaz out and shoot you by accident. I just did it.”

  “I know, but that guy was right. You should put it away.”

  “I’ll put it in my glove compartment,” Frank said. “It’ll be like my home defense system.”

  “Good.”

  Frank said, “You know, your ex kept saying that you tweaked the election all by yourself.”

  She stared at him. “I’m sure he did! That’s how he tried to set it up, too. But I’ve got the evidence of how he framed me along with everything else. And now these guys have it.”

  “Well good. But why didn’t you tell me from the start that you were working with these guys?” Frank gestured in the direction of the mouth of Rock Creek. “You could have told me back in the summer, or even up in Maine.”

  “It’s best never to say any more than necessary in situations like that. I was trying to keep you out of it.”

  “I was already in it! You should have told me!”

  “I didn’t think it would help! So quit about that. It’s been tough. It’s been over a year since I had to go under, do you realize that?”

  “Yes, of course. It feels like it’s been about ten.” Frank put up a hand. Clearly time for limited discussion. Gingerly he reached for her, palm out. Her hand met his, and their fingers intertwined. “Okay,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been scared.”

  “Me too.”

  They walked down the driveway under the awning to Virginia Avenue. They could see the cars’ lights on the Key Bridge. Their cold hands were having their own quick conversation. For a long time they just stood on the sidewalk there, looking around.

  “Do you think it’s really over?” she asked in a low voice.

  “I think maybe so.”

  She took a deep breath, shuddered as she let it out. “I can’t even tell anymore. The group he was part of was pretty extensive. I don’t know if I’m going to feel comfortable, just—you know. Coming back out into the open.”

  “Maybe you don’t have to. They’ll help you set something new up, like in the witness protection thing. I asked them about it.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “I want to show you San Diego.”

  She looked hard at him, eyes searching his face, trying to read something. Their hands were still squeezed hard together. Things were not normal between them, he saw. Perhaps she was still angry at him for asking about the election stuff. For wanting to know what was going on. “Okay,” she said. “Show me.”

  X. YOU GET WHAT YOU GET

  “But our Icarian thoughts returned to ground

  And we went to heaven the long way round.”

  —Thoreau

  -

  CUT TO THE CHASE

  Today’s post:

  I think for a while we forgot what was possible. Our way of life damaged our ability to imagine anything different. Maybe we are rarely good at imagining that things could be different. Maybe that’s what we mean when we talk about the Enlightenment. For a while there we understood that the ultimate source of power is the imagination.

  “Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the Fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into the service of economic royalists. It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control of government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of the Government.”

  That was Franklin Roosevelt, talking as president to the nation in 1936. In the same speech he said, “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

  But then we forgot again. We went back to imagining that things could only be as they were. We lived on in that strange new feudalism, in ways that were unjust and destructive and yet were presented as the only possible reality. We said “people are like that,” or “human nature will never change” or “we are all guilty of original sin,” or “this is democracy, this is the free market, this is reality itself.” And we went along with that analysis, and it became the law of the land. The entire world was legally bound to accept this feudal injustice as law. It was global and so it looked like it was universal. The future itself was bought, in the form of debts, mortgages, contracts—all spelled out by law and enforced by police and armies. Alternatives were unthinkable. Even to say things could be otherwise would get you immediately branded as unrealistic, foolish, naive, insane, utopian.

  But that was all delusion. Every few years things change completely, even though we can’t quite remember how it happened or what it means. Change is real and unavoidable. And we can organize our affairs any way we please. There is no physical restraint on us. We are free to act. It’s a fearsome thing, this freedom, so much so that people talk about a “flight from freedom”—that we fly into cages and hide, because freedom is so profound it’s a kind of abyss. To actually choose in each moment how to live is too scary to endure.

  So we lived like sleepwalkers. But the world is not asleep, and outside our dream, things continued to change. Trying to shape that change is not a bad thing. Some pretend that making a plan is instant communism and the devil’s work, but it isn’t so. We always have a plan. Free market economics is a plan—it plans to give over all decisions to the blind hand of the market. But the blind hand never picks up the check. And, you know—it’s blind. To deal with the global environmental crisis we now face without making any more plan than to trust the market would be like saying, We have to solve this problem so first let’s put out our eyes. Why? Why not use our eyes? Why not use our brain?

  Because we’re going to have to imagine our way out of this one.

  That’s wh
y we made the deal with China. It’s one of the greatest win-win comprehensive treaties of all time. Consider that we had a massive trade deficit running with China, and they had bought a lot more of our debt as well. And because of their population, and their manufacturing capabilities, and their low wages, which by the way depressed wages for every other worker in the world, there wasn’t an obvious way out of that huge imbalance. They had us. We were getting whipped in the so-called free market by a communist command-and-control political structure that could inflict austerity measures on their own people, which allowed them to win that game. That just goes to show you how free the free market really was, by the way; dictatorships did better at it than democracies! I leave it as an exercise for the blog’s responders to hash over what that might mean, but in the meantime, in the real world it was a big problem!

  And yet at the same time this so-called success of the Chinese was achieved in part by treating their people and landscape like disposables, and it simply wasn’t true, and those false economics were beginning to backlash on them in bigger and bigger ways. They were creating terrible physical problems, worse problems than ours, really, because we’ve been cleaning up our land and air and water for decades now, as part of the smart planning of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, so that our troubles were mostly on paper. But the Chinese had trashed China itself, and they were headed right to the brink of a major ecological systems crash. Maybe global warming and the giant drought that has afflicted central and east Asia was the final push, but certainly their own poisonous habits had pooled up around them, and the cumulative impacts were going to kill entire regions and endanger the lives of one-sixth of humanity.