With an effort, he blinked against the glare of lights that swung across his held of vision. The echoes sounded familiar; he guessed he was in the parking basement of the Agency house on Riverside Drive, and moments later he saw the familiar elevator doors. Would they hold the interrogation in the subbasement? That would show a certain decorum, a return to the precise scene of the crime.
Instead the elevator rose three floors. Mostly supply rooms and offices here, Wigner recalled, well away from the residential floors. He noticed a red-faced guard in camouflage fatigues posted by the elevator, the muzzle of a Mallory Streetsweeper automatic shotgun jutting above his shoulder. What were they expecting, an invasion?
He forced himself to think: His arrest was probably the result of accumulated suspicions, not some particular slip. They would have Pierce as well. Within an hour or two they would have the names of the major people in the wailing-wall network, of the people with Flatfoot Fujii’s defence program. Well, it had always been a gamble. The odds had been better for him than for his cognates on Ulro and Urizen, but they had never been good.
His bearers carried him down a narrow hall past metal doors painted with glossy white enamel. One door opened; as they carried him through, Wigner glimpsed panelled walls hung with good prints by Dali, including the kitschy Christus Hypercubus.
They slid him into a dentist’s chair in the middle of the room, then strapped him in and tilted him upright. Wigner’s peripheral vision was narrowed by the drug, but he was aware of a glossy vinyl floor, a couple of desks, the black screen of a computer terminal.
Three men sat in armchairs below the painting of Christ suspended in mid-air and staring into an empty black sky. In the middle was Clement, dressed uncharacteristically in jeans and blue work shirt. The other two Wigner recognized from files as interrogation experts: Whitestone from Langley, a pale man with close-cropped blond hair, and Phelan from Denver, heavyset, with a paunch and eyelids that sagged like a basset’s. Both were dressed in nondescript slacks and cheap white shirts: interrogation clothes.
Wigner tried to laugh and only choked. Clement frowned.
“Get him into shape, will you?”
Phelan reached into a small black medical satchel on the floor beside him; then he stepped forward and slipped a needle into Wigner’s left arm. The arm came to painful life; with every beat of his heart, Wigner felt the antidote waken nerves across his chest, his back, his limbs. The pickup team had shot him in the left shoulder; the spot felt like a ripe boil. His mouth filled with saliva and dribbled before he could make himself swallow.
“Can you talk, Eric?” asked Clement. “What was so funny just now?”
“A…genuine…case of…deja vu."
“How so?” Clement sounded calm, almost cordial.
With an effort Wigner cleared his throat and regained full control of his voice. What he wanted to say deserved Trainable terseness, yet these men would fail to understand it unless he spelled it out. They would also use whatever methods they thought would compel him to speak, and Wigner did not want to be drugged anymore, or tortured. The game was up.
“On Ulro,” he said hoarsely, “these two interrogated me after Senator Cooledge was assassinated. I have a feeling I already know what they’re going to ask.”
“I’m lost already,” Clement replied. “Can you help us understand?”
“With pleasure. On Ulro, just like here on Earth, I recruited Jerry Pierce as a hit man. He’s a Trainable who’s also a natural killer. When I ran across him, I had some vague idea of developing a new organization that would take over when the government finally collapsed. On Ulro, we knocked off a few people. Then the Wabbies’ computer virus nearly overthrew the government, and as part of their coup they murdered a lot of their political enemies, including Cooledge. My cognate on Ulro sent Jerry Pierce after the Wabbie executive, and he cleaned them up, but then the FBI caught him and that led to me. Of course, on Ulro the interrogation was about a year from now, and it wasn’t held here. It was in Langley.”
“Amazing. And how have you come to know this?”
Wigner shrugged, although it hurt to do so. “Jerry brought back a lot more than those six microfiches. Several years’ worth of executive briefings and Agency
personnel records. Including the transcripts of my interrogations.”
“Indeed. That’s very interesting. What did we do to you on Ulro?”
“Shipped me off to a camp in Wyoming and then shot me.”
“I’m not surprised at that. Your actions have deeply prejudiced your relationship with the Agency.”
Wigner laughed; that hurt, too. “They certainly have, Jonathan.”
Whitestone cleared his throat. “Eric, can you explain your motives for us?”
“I’ll be glad to, Donald. If you’d like to drug me again, you’re perfectly welcome, but it’s really not essential.”
“Thank you,” said Whitestone with a pale smile. “It’s a pleasure to deal with a professional.”
“For me as well. I know you won’t take it personally when I tell you that your un-Trainability — yours, Jonathan’s, everybody’s — means you’re incapable of handling the problems we face today.”
“Go on,” said Whitestone, his grey eyes unblinking.
“In the last half century,” said Wigner slowly, choosing his words, “the world’s ruling classes have been outstripped by technology several times. First with nuclear weapons, then with computers, and now with Trainability. Each advance has made the rulers less able to rule, and given more power to the rulers’ servants. Ruling class incompetence has been enshrined.”
“I won’t argue that,” said Phelan dolefully, his basset eyes turned to the ceiling. Wigner rewarded him with a smile.
“The servants have found this a pretty acceptable state of affairs. First they encourage their citizens to live in a fantasy world. The citizens periodically choose a scoundrel who pretends their fantasy world is real. Once he’s in office, the scoundrel turns to the servants to find out what to do. They tell him what they find convenient, and he does it, and everything moves along comfortably.”
“Please, Eric.” Clement sounded mildly impatient.
“Jonathan, I am telling you now what I have never told you before. Pay attention. Now, since Trainability has come in we’ve had servants of servants, and I guess we’ve done with you what you’ve done with our rulers. The difference is this: we’ve seen that we no longer have the room that you did. You could build your careers on playing games with nuclear weapons, or fooling around with Third World economies, because the only casualties were nameless people in Latin America or the Middle East. By the time we turned up, the casualties were happening right here in America. You’d screwed up the world economy, and now it was hurting us. You’d let the technological initiative pass overseas, and now it was hurting us. You thought you could go on indefinitely as lords of creation, and now you had to hurt your own people.
“Well, Trainables could see where this was leading. We were going to be killed just to keep you un-Trainables in power for a couple of years, and then everything was going to go down the toilet anyway. The Ulro documents only confirm what we’ve been expecting for years. Even what I gave you, Jonathan, should have made you think about where we were headed, about the stupidity of going on supporting the idiots on ExComm.”
“Go on,” said Clement calmly.
“But you simply treated your own death certificate as an avoidable contingency. You might accept intellectually the idea that the Trainables were the only people able to take over and run things, but you and your colleagues couldn’t accept it emotionally. That would mean handing over power, real power, to a bunch of pimply teenagers. That would mean accepting the fact that you’d failed. That all the reasons for maintaining yourselves as the real rulers were phony.”
“So you thought you could do better,” said Phelan. “I knew we could, the way a computer can do better than an abacus. You know it, too, or you wouldn’t have hired so many of us
. The whole system would have crashed years ago if we hadn’t propped it up for you.”
“Instead of propping it up, you seem to have worked hard to knock it down,” Clement said mildly. “You were behind all these scandals, weren’t you?”
“Some of them.”
“And you learned about them from the information Pierce brought back, the stuff you hid from us.”
“In part. The microfiches showed me where to look in our own databases.”
“Did it ever occur to you that the government, with the same access to your data, might have used it at least as well as you?”
“No. You’d never have gone after Tony Charles for selling fentanyl. He was too useful in Congress, helping keep the lid on for ExComm. Would you have gone to Moriyama and told him to get Tokyo to cancel their colonization plan for Eden?”
“What was that?” Whiteside demanded. Wigner told him. Clement, for the first time, looked genuinely angry but said nothing.
“You wouldn’t have been discreet about it,” Wigner went on. “It would’ve been more convenient to make a fuss, stir up some more anti-Jap feeling, distract people for a couple of weeks.”
No one spoke for a moment. Wigner rubbed his head wearily.
“I expect we’ll get all the details in good time,” Clement said at last. He had regained his composure. “But I’d like to know why you didn’t just try to take over the Agency and run things to suit yourself. Or even stage a coup. When we finally tracked down your recent income, we knew something was rotten. According to your bank balance, you could’ve rented a good-sized army.” Wigner was annoyed; he had tried to cover his tracks, but bank computers were too easily penetrated. He should have known better.
“Why take possession of a burning house?”
“Is that all your country means to you?”
“Jonathan, nationalism is dead. All those stupid sentimental ideas, flags, parades, the pledge of bloody allegiance, yellow ribbons — they’re dead, they’re worse than dead. They’re poisoning the living. Nationalism’s killed a hundred million people in the last century, and it would’ve killed even more if we’d gone the way of Ulro and Urizen. It’s like the bonding behaviour of a baboon troop, but we’re not baboons anymore. Would you trust a baboon with a nuclear bomb, or an I-Screen?”
“You’re being sophomoric,” Clement replied. “Excuse me, I’ve been more realistic than you and your Langley friends. If we’d let the Japanese colonize California on Eden, you un-Trainables would’ve run us into a war — not just here on Earth, but on Eden as well. We’d have been like the Europeans in the sixteenth century, fighting each other for control of places they hadn’t even known existed a little earlier. For the greater glory of Portugal or Holland.”
Clement looked pained. “This is ridiculous. Why should you care if we fight a war with the Japanese or the Russians or the Malagasy Republic? You’re going to be okay.”
“Have you been paying attention, Jonathan? The Trainables know we’re not going to be okay. I-Screen or not, the United States of America is about to fall. It fell on Ulro, it fell on Urizen, and it would’ve fallen here. But instead of falling into ruins, this time it has a chance of surviving. In your scenario, I’m dead whether I back you up or not. In my scenario, I have a damn good chance of not only surviving but prevailing.”
“Ah! Prevailing how?” asked Whitestone.
“The International Federation will need an agency very much like this one, only more so. I’m going to run it.”
“That was your plan,” Phelan grunted.
“That’s still my plan.”
“You don’t seem to understand the seriousness of your position, Eric,” said Clement. “Given what you’ve told us so far, plus what we’ve learned on our own, we could put you away just the way they apparently did on Ulro. Don’t you understand that you’ve committed treason, conspired to overthrow the government, broken dozens of laws? Don’t you understand that you’re a felon?”
“Let’s go downtime and run that past George Washington and the other founding fathers,” said Wigner. “What are you going to do, put me on trial?”
“We lean toward disappearing you, Eric.”
“That would be stupid. You’d be foreclosing your options.”
“Dismantling the United States is not an option for us, Eric. Never.”
Wigner looked at Clement: a middle-aged man with tired eyes and the flesh of his thin cheeks beginning to sag into jowls. A decent enough man by his own lights, trying to save the only world he really knew, a world he thought he understood. A patriot, a loyal member of the baboon troop ready to protect the troop even if it meant all baboons, all troops including his own, were to perish.
Wigner felt a cold spike of despair. The republic would fall, but not until the baboons had ensured that nothing could rise in its place but anarchy and bandit empires.
Phelan was jotting something down on a pad of paper. His droopy eyes looked up and met Wigner’s with a concentrated glare of intelligence.
“You mentioned a Wabbie attack. That’s a new one on me.”
“They’ve got some good hackers out there in the woods. On Ulro, one of ’em worked out a nasty computer virus. It damn near wrecked the whole Civil Emergency Administration, and if the Wabbies hadn’t been so dumb they might’ve taken over right there. I decided to provoke them, make’em move prematurely.”
“How?” asked Phelan gently.
“The details of the virus are described in an appendix to one of the executive briefings from Ulro. I put them down on a disc and passed it over to the Wabbies. I knew they’d experiment with it a little, and then go right for our throats.”
Phelan looked deeply surprised. “You passed the secrets of a computer virus over to the White American Brotherhood?”
“Yep.”
“You son of a bitch.” Phelan seemed on the edge of losing his temper: his face turned a mottled red.
“They were going to develop it anyway. This way they’ll strike before they’re ready, and they’ll expose themselves badly.”
“Do you have a timetable for them, Eric?” asked Clement softly. “Think. You can help undo the damage you’ve done, some of it anyway. You can show us your heart’s in the right place.”
“I have no idea when they’ll move. Again, you’re quite welcome to drug me; I’ll give you the same answer.”
“Perhaps.” Clement stood up and stretched, then paced back and forth in front of the Dali. “Let’s begin somewhere near the beginning, shall we? In as much detail as possible.”
Delay was pointless, deception futile. Wigner began to talk, fully answering their occasional questions. Whitestone sometimes took notes, scribbling busily on a small pad of paper. That seemed both sad and comical to Wigner, but he did not cry or laugh.
Half an hour into the story, the room went black for a second before the standby generator kicked in. Wigner went on talking. A moment later the red-faced guard entered.
“Excuse me, sirs. East 52nd Street reports the Iffer demonstration is turning into a riot. They thought you ought to know.”
“Thank you,” said Clement with a warm smile. “Please keep us posted whenever anything develops.”
“Uh, that might be kind of hard, sir. We got the message by a courier on a bike. Phones are out.”
“Here or there?” Clement asked.
“Looks like it’s the whole city, sir. Courier says it’s a real zoo out there. Traffic lights aren’t working, Iffers running around fighting the cops, real crazy.”
Clement nodded. “Thanks again. That’ll be all.” The room was quiet for a time. Clement got up and walked back and forth. “What’s your opinion, Eric?”
“My opinion’s not worth a damn. If you think it’s the Wabbies, turn on that computer and hook it up to the phone lines. That’ll tell you quickly enough if there’s a virus loose.”
Clement nodded to Phelan, who rose with surprising grace for such a heavy man and went over to the terminal. It was
an old-fashioned IBM that had to be switched on by hand. Phelan tapped out a couple of brief commands while Clement and Whitestone watched from a distance. Wigner watched, too, ignoring the ache in his muscles.
Phelan switched through three commercial databases without trouble; the screen glowed in the characteristic background colours of each database. Then he opened a link with the Langley computer and the screen flashed into a pattern of green hexagons.
“I can’t get it to function.”
“Reset it,” Clement suggested quietly.
The hexagons faded, then returned. “Nothing,” said Phelan.
Whitestone cleared his throat. “That means the Langley database has been destroyed. Probably the National Security Agency as well, and Defence Intelligence and CEA and the State Department. Continental Army Command. NORAD.”
“Plus telephones, radar, air traffic control. We’ve been decapitated,” Phelan said, nodding. “Boy, that’s some virus you gave them, Eric.”
“If the Russians realize what’s happened, we’re screwed,” Whitestone said.
“On Ulro the virus got over there, too.” Wigner told him. “Not as thoroughly, but enough to bog them down.”
“You knew this was coming,” Clement said, spinning away from the terminal and striding toward Wigner. “You must have made some kind of preparation. What?”
“A program. Wherever the virus tries to access a protected computer, the program destroys the virus and traces its origin. If this really is the Wabbie attack, we’ll know every virus source before sunrise.”
“Who’s we?”
Wigner thought for a moment. If he could stall them long enough, just a few more hours, the District T-Colonels could swoop down on the Wabbies and wipe them out. Senator Cooledge and her allies could ram Bill 402 through while the government was still prostrated. It would be a gamble, because he had based his plans on being free to coordinate the suppression of the Wabbies and the overthrow of Ex-Comm and the CEA. This way, no one would be in charge.
If he talked, he could perhaps regain control: in exchange for coordinating the suppression of the wailing-wall network and the Iffers, he might be able to regain influence with the Agency. It and the government would owe their existence to him. He could buy time to work out some new plan to deal with the chronoplanes and Doomsday.
The Fall of the Republic (The Chronoplane Wars Book 2) Page 20
