Directive 51 (20 page)

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.”

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 Ysabel’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
.”

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.”

“Many messages aren’t sent by anyone,” Arnie said, “even though they’re perceived and received. A deer doesn’t leave tracks or scent because it’s trying to tell hunters or dogs where to find it. If there
is
an intention, that’s expressed through yet more signs, which might or might not be important. So it doesn’t matter that the other drivers weren’t trying to say anything to you. And it doesn’t matter that any one car had its lights on or off—one car could just be a forgetful person or one of those cars that doesn’t give you a choice. But a
population
of signs formed a message. One swallow does not a summer make, but five thousand swallows and a million green buds on the trees and forty Memorial Day sales in the stores does.

“Those messages that no one intends to send, that are sent by a lot of different sources collectively, are called system artifacts. Like people doing the wave in a stadium; the wave isn’t any one person, but it’s visible to everyone. Like one color of scrunchy being reserved for the popular girls in a school; nobody makes it up, everyone just knows. Surprising numbers of fads and fashions have no originator for any practical purpose.”

“So you guess at fads and trends like the pattern recognizers?” Colonel Green asked. “And you’re studying how Daybreak is a fad?”

“No.” Arnie had an expression that amused Heather every time she saw it; it was the same one she’d seen on an astronomer who had been asked to cast a horoscope. “The pattern recognizers and trendspotters just know a lot about fads in the past, and they watch the news and the social media and look for things that look like what happened before; it’s all about their feeling and intuition.”

“The sort of thing I do,” Crittenden put in. “Highly believable and I like to think insightful, but nothing the historian at Charlemagne’s court couldn’t have done.”

“At least it’s entertaining,” Arnie said, “but forgive my pointing out it’s not science, and it can’t tell you anything you don’t already know on some level. What I do is describe in numbers the whole huge network of communications—everyone and everything, be it person, bot, book, web site, accident, whatever creates signs, and the signs they send, and everything that interprets the signs and the secondary signs that they send to each other about them. There are numbers and geometry to express all the ways the messages and their sources and targets are similar, different, parallel, whatever. That results in huge data structures, many terabytes even for the most elementary problems, which is why no one did this before supercomputers. Then, with a very fast computer, we use wavelet shrinkage—that’s a statistical method for estimating fractals if you’re up on your math—to find patterns that are persisting.

“Or to oversimplify and use an analogy—which is what Dr. Crittenden does, and why he’s easier to understand than I am—the pattern recognizers look at the clouds, and say ‘That’s a horsie, I feel good about horsies, I guess it won’t rain for the picnic.’ I teach the computer to look at trillions of pictures of clouds and notice that puffy ones with flat bottoms are associated with lightning and hail—even if I’ve never seen a cloud before.”

“Or a horsie,” Green said, grinning. “I’ve got grandkids. I can relate to horsies.”

“Or a horsie,” Arnie said. “I don’t find horsies, I find the pattern by which people learn to look for horsies—and I also find some people talking to some other people are more likely to call them horsies, and under what circumstances, and maybe construct a relationship that associates with the prefix
grand-
in other relationships. And I can do that in languages I don’t speak. So statistical semiotic analysis shows me brand-new patterns, things that haven’t been perceived before relating in ways that people haven’t named before; from there we can work out the tests and methods for detecting following those patterns if they’re important and persistent.

“Usually these patterns that fall out of the math are just what we call an idea pump—a person or organization that just repeats a message and encourages interested people to repeat it—and those are intentional and single-minded. Like the pattern of beer commercials having pretty girls and occurring during football games in North America.

“Sometimes the math finds a complex system like Islam, ‘Go Angels!’, or model railroading, where there are central ideas that change little and repeat often, but generate a huge volume of secondary short-lived messages—like Catholicism, say, the pope says pretty much what every pope always said, but your Catholic mother says, ‘What would Father McCarthy say if he found out you did that?’, that’s a secondary message reproducing and altering part of the primary message.”

“You were going to explain system artifact, Arnie,” Heather prompted.

Edwards cleared his throat. “I think I see where this is going from what Arnie’s already said. So a system artifact is a pattern that carries a message and originates in the system, not from any one participant, but from everyone at once.”

“Exactly,” Arnie said.

“Like esprit de corps, or corporate culture?” Green said. “No one makes them up, and you can’t order people to have them, they just sort of grow between people, but anyone who’s been around them knows they’re real.”

Steve looked up, and said, “That’s what you think Daybreak is. A group of ideas that . . . what, fused? Found a way to . . . ?”