Tropic of Kansas
Page 7
Sig hugged Tania when he left but left the crying to her.
Mom said don’t worry, you can bet he’ll be back. He likes it here.
20
As soon as she got home after the Secret Service released her, Tania started looking for Mom.
She had asked Gerson for more info, but all her new covert handler had was a somewhat sketchy govspeak write-up of their deal, a phone to use solely for staying in touch with Gerson, and a promise to send more later.
Tania signed the deal, took the phone, and tried to collect herself on the train home.
The new phone, she assumed, was also a tracking device, a way for them to make sure she was keeping her part of the bargain. She kept it out on the table while she worked. It was like studying in public. It helped her focus, and keep the crazy at bay.
If Mom’s file was online, it was on a network Tania couldn’t access.
Mom was not the type of person you could track through her public digital traces. She lived life in person, helping people she could see with her own eyes.
So Tania made some phone calls, on her own phone. Left a pretty freaked-out message at the house. Talked to one of the employees at the shop, who confirmed the detention but didn’t know where. Then she got through to Cousin Mell.
“You need to get home now!” yelled Mell. “They won’t even let her talk to a lawyer, and they won’t let any of us see her because we’re not immediate family.”
“I’m working on it,” said Tania. “Do you know where they have her?”
“She’s in the Box.”
Tania’s stomach turned.
The Box was the windowless federal annex out by the airport. The building that people joked was built without exits. Halfway house to the private prisons where they liked to send political criminals.
“I know how to get her out,” said Tania. And after she hung up, that felt like a lie.
She sat there crying for a long time, the prisoner ID band still on her wrist. She thought about her options. About other ways she could get Mom out. People she could call who might have connections, or at least access. She took a long shower. She drank a glass of the strong stuff, the stuff she kept in a cupboard she could hardly reach.
She started looking for Sig.
She didn’t have much luck. That probably meant neither had they. If Mom was a digital blip, Sig was invisible. But she looked anyway. You had to exhaust all options.
They had not downgraded her access level. They might even have upgraded it. She imagined them watching her as she searched. She thought about ways she could evade that. Maybe with her own encryption layer. Or a borrowed account, preferably with higher clearance. Todd at the office would know. And he owed her a favor.
Then a little box popped up on-screen. One of those annoying messages from BreakRoom, the workplace chat site. Looked like spam. You gotta check this out! A masked link. There was a note below the subject line, saying “*per our discussion today,” and then she saw the handle of the sender—
It was Sig’s detention file, excerpted. The file was thin on details. Standard deportation turned into order for indefinite holding via transfer to North Central Temporary Detention Center. Detroit. He escaped before the transfer.
There was footage of the escape loaded to the file. Grainy perimeter cam frames that looked black-and-white until the yellow jumpsuit popped into the middle of the frame like mustard splat on snow.
He looked even wilder than she remembered. The way he moved. Feral. The way he went over the barbed fence. Ouch.
She read the after-action report. He’d gone ghost. Back into the woods. They didn’t know where to look.
She thought about those nature shows, where the dudes catch an animal, put a tag on it, and release it back into the wild, to find its true habitat, learn more about how it lives, and locate the entire social group of animals with which it interacts. She laughed to herself imagining doing such a thing to Sig, wishing she had done it to him when he was a kid. And then she realized that was exactly what they were doing to her.
Thinking about it that way made everything clearer, and made her a lot more pissed off. She should have been most angry at the people who were manipulating her, and the impersonal institutions that controlled them. But who she was really mad at was Sig, for putting Mom’s and her lives on the line, even as she knew blaming him was like blaming that animal for escaping its captors.
She needed to find him.
Tania went to her closet and found the file box she had stuffed back in there the day she moved in and had not touched since. The orange plastic had faded. There were dead bugs curled up in the cracks. But the information inside was intact, if as incomplete as when she had given up all those years before.
This was the kind of information you didn’t keep on your computer.
And as she started digging through it, trying to find her way to the present through the yellowed relics of the past, she began to wonder whether maybe they were right. Maybe Mom, and Sig, and all those people she left behind were in on something bigger than Tania or anyone else in Washington knew.
21
“Just because you got a conviction in the Reinbeck case doesn’t make you immune,” said Mike. “You really never want me to get a call like I got yesterday.”
They were in Mike’s office. Fifth floor, with a view of Dulles. A black and red AmLog cargo jet lumbered through the window frame behind Mike’s head, carrying fresh heavy metal from the hub in Stansted. Bert and Tania were at Mike’s breakout table, waiting to go over a file, but ten minutes in and Mike hadn’t stopped laying into Tania about her candid camera moment.
“Who called?” asked Tania. She tried to keep it cool, wondering but figuring they hadn’t outed her to her boss.
“You don’t want to know,” said Mike. “Somebody from the personal detail. You know, the people trained to die to protect their leader? Do you have any idea how strict they are about the perimeter they maintain around him now?”
“I waved at him!”
“You yelled at him, Tania! Called him a fascist!” He shook his head.
“Tyrant,” muttered Tania.
“We both saw the footage,” said Bert. “Not your best moment. You’re lucky they censored it. That clip so wanted to be all over the Feed.”
“People yell at him all the time,” said Tania. “All those huge rallies he has. People go nuts. Call out his name. Slander his enemies. Chant the slogans.”
“Careful,” said Bert, pointing at the ceiling.
“You really don’t get it,” said Mike. “Those are his supporters, at events where everyone has been vetted. And coached. It’s a potential felony just to be where you were, doubly so when you bullshit your way in. If you act out in there—”
“Room Twenty-Three,” said Bert, laughing.
“Right,” said Mike. “I guess. Put it this way. This little office of ours doesn’t need this kind of attention. Got it?”
Tania nodded.
“We took you on here because of your skills, because we needed a third hand,” said Mike. “And because the ‘personality’ matching—aka political demerits—that got you referred to us happen to be just the kind of thing we like to see—”
Bert pointed up again, more emphatically this time.
Mike turned on the white noise machine on his desk.
“Tania,” said Mike, changing his tone, less agitated but even more serious. “We operate here on as tenuous a basis as some endangered bird. A table scrap thrown to the diminishing minority in Congress that doesn’t go with the whole program of the party in power. There are just the three of us, sharing our resources with other offices that have very different agendas. Now we are working some angles that could help bring real change, and you’re out screaming for adverse political attention. Do you fucking get it?”
If only he knew.
“Yes,” said Tania. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me.”
“Newton Towns is what got into you,” said Bert, raising his eyebrows. “I wish he’d get into me.”
“Jesus,” said Mike.
“I knew you had a crush on him,” said Tania. “Too bad. I saw him first.”
“Can we talk about the cases now?” said Mike. “What do you hear from the Canadians, Bert?”
“They found them,” said Bert.
“The guns?” said Mike.
Tania nodded, pointed at Bert. “P-B shipment. Got ‘lost’ in Chicago.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Separatists,” said Bert. “I found them in a raid two days ago. Manitoba. Anonymized but a definite match.”
“Weird,” said Mike.
“Maybe not,” said Bert.
“Bert doesn’t think they were lost,” said Tania. “He thinks they ended up exactly where they were meant to be. I think he’s right.”
“Pendleton-Bolan guys are supplying Canadian guerrillas,” said Mike. “The President’s old company. That’s what you’re saying?”
“That’s what RCMP thinks,” said Bert. “It’s a pretty good theory, actually.”
“Maybe if you’re a Canadian,” said Mike. “There are many plausible explanations for those facts. But this is good. Anything else?”
“Funny you should ask,” said Bert, adjusting his glasses. “I haven’t even told Tania about this one.”
“No secrets in the office,” said Tania, wondering if she should tell hers. “First rule you told me, Bert.”
“Had to wait for you to get out of jail, honey,” said Bert.
Mike almost smiled.
“This also comes from the Mounties,” said Bert. “Evidently the same gang that’s running the guns for P-B is smuggling other contraband back in.”
“What kind?” said Mike.
“Information,” said Bert. “Content. Video, foreign media, porn, all kinds of stuff. Prohibited stuff.”
“They’ll love that downtown,” said Mike. “Could earn us some points. But I’m not buying the idea that corporates are breaking the White House’s own rules on command and control.”
“I don’t know,” said Bert. “They have a source. Somebody they busted at this raid. Says they have one customer who’s buying it all. Not sure where.”
Tania remembered what the nameless Secret Service agent told her. Figure something out. Maybe he knew what they were working on. Maybe getting them off the trail was his real agenda. Maybe it was working.
“It must be there, in Minnesota,” said Tania. She had never tried to steer the facts like this. It was illuminating.
“Could be,” said Bert. “A relay station, or at least some good sources who know.”
“We should find it,” said Tania.
“You’re killing me,” said Mike. “I’m tempted, but you need to focus on the guns.”
“Let me go out there,” said Tania.
“You have other projects,” said Mike.
“Not as hot as this one,” said Tania. “Like you said, this could earn us some serious points. Might even get you a commendation.”
“Handshake from the veep,” said Bert.
Tania smiled. “Seriously,” she said. “Besides, I know my way around out there.”
Mike groaned.
“I like it,” said Bert. “We can tag-team this one. Maybe put a bigger chunk of the puzzle together. I always feel like there’s so much more going on.”
Mike looked at Tania. Tania looked at the window.
“What aren’t you telling me, Tania?”
She tried to banish the truth from her mind as best she could, but only started to blush. She tried a different tact.
“Trust me on this one, okay?” said Tania, giving him the most earnest face she could muster. “It feels right. I’ll make it right.”
She meant it, even if she wasn’t sure she could deliver.
Mike stared at her. They listened to the white noise for a minute. Tania raised her eyebrows.
“Okay,” said Mike. “You go to Minnesota. I’ll order the travel pass today. And Bert, you go to Toronto or wherever.”
“Winnipeg,” said Bert.
“Whatever,” said Mike.
“They’re on complete opposite sides of the—”
“Whatever. See if you can find some better proof. Good enough to withstand crunching by the logic bots. This one has to be crazy solid to stick.”
“Agreed,” said Bert.
“Can I get some help from Todd?” asked Tania.
“If you want to go down there, knock yourself out,” said Mike. “Just don’t spend any more of our money.”
“Thank you,” said Tania.
“You’re welcome, I guess,” he said. “And Tania, I’m not fucking around here. If you get in trouble like that again?”
Tania looked down.
“Don’t come back.”
22
The television set reminded Tania of the one her grandma had. It was weird to see it here in Todd’s computer forensics lab full of high-tech digital equipment. But Todd had a gift for the weird shit. Other agencies sent him theirs, the stuff for which there was no user manual.
“It was harder to find than I expected,” said Todd. “These things have been obsolete since the MOFUC.”
“The huh?”
“The Mandatory Open Format Universal Conversion,” said Todd. “You remember, the ‘Force Feed.’ Where FCC and Motherland mandated that all media—broadcast, terrestrial, cable, online, you name it—operate on the new digital standard dictated by the government.”
“The MOFUC, right,” said Tania. “I had to buy a new personal phone and a hundred-dollar box for my TV.”
“Exactly,” said Todd. “Me, too. Except I was happy about it. It put everything on the same network. You can do so much more now. Especially the things we do.”
He fiddled with one of the dials.
“Though I’m thinking this thing is actually kind of cool,” he said.
It was tuned to technicolor snow.
“Not seeing it,” said Tania. “It even smells kind of funny.”
“Yeah, I don’t think it was stored well. Electronics are a little gummy. Had to try four different thrift stores before I found one—they said people have been coming in and buying them. Past year or so.”
“Weird. What use is a TV that only tunes dead air?”
“That’s what I’m showing you.”
He fiddled with an adapter attached to the back of the set, extended the antenna, and tuned two of the knobs.
“UHF,” said Todd. “Totally illegal. And totally weird old over-the-air broadcast tech I barely understand. Here it is.”
The picture was grainy. A black woman, sitting at a desk, in front of a map of the United States, reading a string of numbers out loud. The colors of an old Polaroid that had been sitting in a box.
“Seven. Nine. Three. One. Three. Zero. Four. Seven.”
“All it needs is a burning log,” said Tania. “Code?”
“Six. Nine. Zero. Nine. Three. Three. Three. One.”
“Yeah, has to be,” said Todd. “They use different channels at different times, with a few different readers. Sometimes they run test patterns that look like they might have some kind of steganographic stuff going on. I’ve also seen a lot of banned programming—foreign news, atrocity stuff, anti-Executive propaganda.”
“Bert’s lead.”
“Exactly—that’s how we found it—but other times they just have weird, random shows. Hunting videos, Mexican movies, police drone feed outtakes, warporn. The kind of prohibited stuff you’d buy in a truck stop. Once I actually saw a speech, just like a ten-minute rant about you know who.”
Todd pointed his thumb at the framed portrait of the President hanging on the wall by the light switch. It was the new official portrait, the one where you could see the scars.
“I think the ranter
was someone I’ve seen in the files. I’m working on a match.”
“Really?” said Tania. “Tell me more.”
“I’m kind of stuck,” he said, shaking his head.
“Not very helpful. Can those guys you work with in Motherland help you?”
“Good idea. Maybe they’d let me access the DdB, look for matches.”
“Why don’t you let me help you,” said Tania. “Get me access to the dissident database, give me some screenshots, I’ll find them for you fast. While you focus on this.” She put her hand on the TV.
“Maybe,” said Todd.
“Think you could ask them about the other watch lists they keep?” said Tania. “The unofficial ones?”
“You sound like one of them,” he said, pointing at the TV.
“Lighten up,” said Tania. “They know you’re a Boy Scout. Can you at least tell where the broadcasts are coming from?”
Todd made a face. “It’s really hard to say. This stuff is so elusive. Ethereal, literally. Masked behind terrestrial relays, on platforms our gear doesn’t track. I’m working on it as a math problem, but I bet the fastest way would be to penetrate the network. HUMINT.”
Tania looked at the lady on the screen, and wondered.
“That makes sense,” she said. “Where would you start?”
“Someplace in the Midwest, maybe,” said Todd. “Lot of big old antennas out there in the zones. And that is where the insurrection is concentrated.”
“The Tropic,” said Tania. “Makes sense.”
“We should look in St. Louis,” said Todd.
“Mike’s sending me to Minnesota,” said Tania. “Can you look for possible sources there?”
Todd shrugged. “I guess,” he said. “Could be a node there. Definitely a known dissident scene. Might get some tips from them.”
“That’s the plan,” said Tania. She put her hand on the outlaw receiver. “Can I take this with me?”
“No,” said Todd. “But I found something even better for you.”