Directive 51 (7 page)

Browder shrugged ostentatiously. “The world lived through that.”

Crittenden shook his head as if Browder were trying to BS through an oral quiz and not convincing anyone. “Better a high card you know in another man’s hand than a joker loose in the deck. The nihilists’ thirty years of bombings and assassinations smoothed the road for Lenin and communism in a dozen different ways. The Futurists . . . well, Marinetti, their founder, was among the first intellectuals to support Mussolini. So before Dr. Yang entered, I was about to say, Heather was absolutely right to bring this to our attention.” He favored Heather with a sardonic smile. “But Dr. Yang’s news has convinced me that we should not be worried. We should be
scared
. Heather, if there’s anything my office can do to help you determine what we’re dealing with, please call me at once.”

“I know I can count on all of you,” Heather said.

Graham was beaming at her, leaning back against the wall just below the poster Heather had given him. She’d found an old magazine in the library with a perfect article title—and the facing page for the article had depicted a robot taking dictation on an old-fashioned steno pad, a typist in a space helmet, and a woman doing her nails in front of what appeared to be some sort of gigantic computer console—all those images surrounding the caption THE SECRETARY OF THE FUTURE!

She’d had it blown up to poster size as a gag gift; Graham had insisted on hanging it in the conference room to remind everyone how silly it was to spend your life trying to predict the unpredictable.

Her old teacher dropped her a wink; in that instant, it was like he’d seated her on the couch by his fireplace, handed her a drink, and heard her troubles out—something he’d done often enough in reality.

Browder was still sitting where Crittenden’s glare had frozen him; with a grudging nod, he said, “Let me see how many resources I can shift to cover the technical side of Daybreak.”

Allie looked up from her notes and grinned; Graham was already smiling at her; and it was left to Arnie to spoil the mood by saying, “Well, by the way, it’s nice that everyone agrees, but we probably
are
under attack.”

Jason had placed sixteen eggs; the most entertaining one was right on the crotch of the smiling cowgirl on a neon sign over the gate of a roadhouse.
Wish I could’ve jumped higher, I could’ve put black-egg nipples on her neon-tube boobs.

The two-lane road had climbed up into the park-and-pass country, where whenever a car came the other way, both drivers would raise a hand off the wheel in salute, kind of an
I know we are both here
that always made him feel like he was finally out among the real people. Most of the other cars were SUVs, but after all, he was driving a big old F-150 himself, the only thing they’d been able to find that was cheap, untraceable, and old enough not to rely on as much electronics, so that it stood a chance of finishing the trip.

Anyway, up here, where you could be coping with ground blizzards, deer and cattle on the road, snowdrifts, washouts, all kinds of whatnot, Jason saw no problem with pickups or even the old SUVs.

Emily back at the commune said people used their SUVs for evil things like hunting and going to logging jobs. He’d had a lot of good arguments with Emily about that.

The coolest thing about Daybreak: Almost everyone thought something about the Big System was all right, even positive. But when you put everyone together, you could compromise and agree, hey, we’ll get rid of the thing you hate, if I can get rid of the thing that I hate, and when you were all done, there’d be no Big System left.

A solar sign in the middle of an old clear cut announced to the saplings and brush that there was NO MESSAGE—DRIVE SAFE. He needed the stepladder this time to leave two more little black eggs.

He rolled on, glorious coustajam cranked to rattle the windows, the F- 150 tracing the edges of gulches and crossing steep-sided creeks on high truss bridges—almost like flying, with the land coming up and falling away.

In the last low hills, the small, stunted trees thinned out. The park was all rich browns and grays, dried out and ready for winter, with just streaks of green, gold, and yellow where aspens and cottonwoods revealed creeks. About a dozen pronghorns ran away from the road as the old truck roared by. “Soon, guys,” Jason said. “Soon. Your grandchildren won’t have any idea what an engine means.”

The ground crew weren’t happy. Guns pointed at them made their unhappiness irrelevant. One or two of them had tried to explain that you couldn’t use auto body paint on an airplane and expect it to look like anything, but the small man with the big mustache and the rage in his eyes had caressed the pistol on his hip, and now they were working fast, painting out the Lion Airways insignia on the 737.

They worked from ladders and scissor lifts, using mops, long-handled brushes, even brooms. The drums of white paint stood open all over the hangar, emitting clouds of strong fumes, enough to make men sick. The mustached man said to vomit if they had to but keep working.

He walked over to look at the three captured Americans; the dark-skinned, short man was dead or unconscious, not surprising after the beating they’d given him. He flipped the motionless man over with his boot toe; the open eyes were dried and dull.

The tall white man and the skinny woman lay huddled against each other.
In one of your stupid movies,
he thought,
you would fall in love, overpower all of us, and escape to save the world, but here in reality, you cling to each other like a refugee child clings to a stuffed animal. It is pleasant to see that expression in an American’s eyes instead of a refugee child’s.

He could see no gain in separating the man and the woman, so he returned to shouting at the impromptu paint crew. Already, the Lion Airways insignia was more than half covered; they were at least a half hour ahead of schedule.

Zach coasted up to the next recycling cart on his mud-spattered single-speed pink girl’s bicycle. He still rode awkwardly with his large bags of plastic bottles; he hoped people would think it was because he was drunk. He threw the lid back and glanced around. The first ten seconds was the highest risk—it wouldn’t look like a real bum stealing plastic. One more look around; surely it looked realistic for a bum stealing recyclable plastic to be paranoid?

Zach didn’t know much about being homeless, and even less about being a drunk. The cheap whiskey he’d poured all over his clothes was all the liquor he’d ever bought in his life.

His heart was pounding. Oh, well . . .
Step One, here we go.
Zach dumped his front left bag into the recycling cart—whoever heard of a bum putting plastic bottles
into
the trash? He mixed them thoroughly with the bottles that were already there, stirring with the yardstick he carried.
Wonder if this looks like I’m looking for something?

Step Two was less conspicuous. He scrounged in the recycling cart, looking like any other bum as he filled up his bag, not worrying about happening to take back a few of the bottles he had just deposited there.

He hoped Step Three would look weird enough. He pulled out a Dad’s Root Beer two-liter bottle with a wadded paper napkin inside and uncapped it, retching at the smell. No question, Bugs and DarwinsActor had known their stuff; the inside of the bottle smelled like a fart from a sick cat, and the clear surface was already spotted with cloudy slime. From his coat pocket, he drew a whiskey bottle filled with a mix of beef broth, molasses, and fine-chopped plastic bottles, swirled it, and splashed about a teaspoon into the plastic bottle, taking care to soak the infected napkin.

He carefully left the Dad’s bottle on the top of the heap in the recycling cart; holes would form within an hour, and the solution would drizzle down through the cart.

If anyone in authority asked about the care he took of that special Dad’s bottle, he would explain that it was demonic and he had to sacrifice his whiskey to it and send it away before it destroyed all his plastic.

That made him laugh to himself in a convincingly weird way. So close to the truth, no one would believe it.

“Hey,
shithead
!”

Zach turned around slowly. Scrawny, red-skinned old white man. Bad leg, visible cataract, about six flannel shirts. “This here block is mine,” the man said. “You don’t take no plastic from it.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was your territory. In fact, let me give you a couple bottles from my bag.” Zach handed him two seed bottles; he had more than he would need and was supposed to improvise with some of them.

“That’s real nice a-you,” the man said, “ ’Preciate it.” As he went to tuck the bottle into the huge bag he carried, he caught a whiff, and said, “These smell awful, where’d you get them?”

“Some kids’ party house I think. Think they maybe pissed in ’em. They’re still money.”

“Yeah.” The old man reached out and tapped his shoulder in what was probably intended as a friendly gesture. “Got any money? Want to come in and drink or something?”

“Gotta get me to some more carts,” Zach said. “Any more of these blocks yours?”

“Naw. I ain’t got no block that’s mine. Just people shouldn’t fuck with me, you know?” The old man scratched and squirmed, as if he’d had about as much human contact as he was prepared for. “My name’s Peter. You come by anytime.”

“My name’s Paul,” Zach said.
After all,
he thought
, we’re two guys spreading the stuff that’s going to make the whole world better.

With his face against the window, Samuelson could just see the rising sun. The point of what they’d done to poor Taylor, and of leaving Samuelson with the corpse for so long, and the beating that followed, could only be to make him despair; since that was what they wanted, he’d have to hope.

But not hope to live. He knew in his bones that he wouldn’t live. Whether they killed him or not beforehand, they meant to die themselves. They’d left the door open while they beat him, and he’d seen the big gray metal box, with two of them fussing over it, and the array of fifty-five-gallon drums, in the lounge. He was quite sure that whatever the box and the barrels held, it wasn’t supplies or documents, and their destination—no, their
target
—was a big crowd, a famous building, or both.

The three strong young men who had beaten Samuelson had left bruises everywhere, and now his back and gut ached, and his whole face was sore and puffy.

They’ll demand that I make a statement for broadcast before we hit,
he thought.
Almost for sure. That’s got to be why they care about what I’m feeling. I wonder if I can say the whole phrase “Mohammed is sucking Satan’s dick in hell” before they kill me on camera?
He was surprised at himself, but only a bit.
“New situations call for new insights,”
he thought, quoting some of his speechwriter’s best work.
Maybe I’m just getting in touch with my inner hawk. Some things are hard not to take personally, you know.

He lay sideways on his bed, chained to a furniture bracket, with two guards always watching him.

He really missed Kim.

He wished he’d been more suspicious, more paranoid—maybe just more angry—back when it could do some good, but had to admit that the too-trusting, too-open way he had walked into this had always been his whole approach to life.

He could see now what Rog had been trying so hard to tell him. If your biggest worry was that the other side might stop talking to you . . . well, sooner or later, if there was one genuinely malicious force in the world, you’d meet it, and something like this would happen.
Once I made myself into
John Samuelson, The Man Who Can Always Get a Deal,
I was doomed to come out and meet these guys, even though Rog and everybody who really knew anything told me that it smelled bad and they didn’t want to do it.

He hated feeling like a fool, but it was still no excuse for despair.
I’ve done my best, even if I was wrong. Somebody had to take the chance that they were telling the truth when they said they wanted to talk, and they wanted to make peace. You don’t make peace with people who aren’t dangerous in the first place; that’s not peacemaking, that’s just negotiation.

They had kicked him for looking too closely at his handcuffs, and for looking around the room, and for wiping his face with his sleeve, and for sitting up. Since those were the rules, he’d purposely made a couple of fiddling, fumbling gropes at his cuffs and at the brackets they were attached to, taken the kicks, and let himself subside on his bunk, against the wall, face resting on the window, and pretended to cry uncontrollably—it hadn’t taken much pretending.

With his face on the window, he tried to look like he was finally without hope, overwhelmed by the shock.

“Hang on to your advantage,” he’d been told, over and over, way back when he took the classes in negotiation. “Whatever they don’t know about you, that’s an advantage.” Right now his one advantage, and it wasn’t much of one, was that they didn’t know he was still looking for something he could do.

The water below was featureless. Time hunched, lurched, and hobbled, mocking him with its slowness; if any sort of chance came along, he didn’t want to have to jump into it with stiff and unmoving muscles. He did what he could to ease the muscles without visibly moving. He whimpered and blubbered whenever he had to move a larger muscle, hoping that would make him look broken.