The computer answered, “Searching, interruptions very frequent in IBIS, some
scrawk
.” Then it fell dead quiet.
“Radio, acknowledge.”
No sound.
“Radio, reboot.”
“Rebooting and loading—” a harsh squeal, then silence.
“Computer, internal check.”
A brief, rumbling hiss—then nothing.
Shit, he’d spent a fortune on a good voice-actuated system.
He pulled over at the next roadside rest. When he popped the cover, crusty gray-white stuff that looked like dried toothpaste fell out into his hand from the fuse box. He stared at the mess. It stung and burned where it had touched his fingers.
Del shook the mess off his hand into his litter bag, grabbed a wipe from his box, and swabbed his hands, looking in consternation at the tiny red dots that peppered his palms and fingers.
That gray-white stuff looked like battery corrosion. He took his flashlight around to take a look.
There were drifts and piles of that white crud everywhere, clustering and spilling around every little electronic gadget, engulfing every electric motor and encrusting every cable. The battery sat in a ball of crusty white goo the size of a beach ball.
“Holy shit,” he muttered. He closed up the compartment, got in, prayed—not something he did often, and seldom this sincerely—and tried to start it again. There were clunks and thuds on the first try; fewer of them after he’d tried a few times and then nothing at all.
Furious, thinking about a late load and all that would cost him, and about the bed and shower waiting for him in Des Moines, he took out his cell phone to make the call to the dispatcher. The phone’s screen was an unrecognizable scrawl of light and dark. Fighting panic, Del tried turning it off and on; it came on, wavered, and turned itself off. After that, it wouldn’t come on at all.
On a hunch he didn’t quite understand, he turned his phone over, pulled the battery, and tapped the phone in his hand; little gray-white crumbles fell out, stinging his hand again. The light in his cab went out, and wouldn’t come back on.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. I-90 EAST OF GILLETTE. WYOMING. 7:40 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
It was warm without being stifling in Zach’s Dadmobile.
He drives like my dad, too,
Jason thought. Dad always said it was his “precious cargo habit”—all those years of never looking away from the road because he couldn’t stand to have one of his kids hurt.
Cool, actually, once you understand it.
“You must be dying to get home.”
“Oh, yeah. Wrap up tight, down into the burrow with the cubs.” Zach smiled. “I still want to take down the Big System—but not before the Big System gets me home and lets me find out that everything’s basically okay. Speaking of that, I wonder why we haven’t heard from the President yet?”
“That
is
weird, isn’t it?” Jason said. “All I can find is recaps of what’s already been in the news.” His connection was still up and clear, and still tracking IBISNuStream Samuelson. In a fresh window he called up Goo- 22. “We’re not the only ones worrying. ‘Pendano’ is one of the five most searched words. But there’s just one statement out of the White House—he won’t be appearing at a fund-raiser in West Virginia in the morning. That’s it.”
“What do you suppose he’s doing?”
Jason shrugged. “The media always made a big deal about what good buds Pendano and Samuelson were. Maybe he’s crying.”
“I never liked him, but I hope that’s not true.”
“Yeah. I liked him, but I know what you mean. Funny how it still matters even when we know it’s all going away.”
“What’s all going away?”
“Dude. The Big System. I mean, Daybreak’s here. Whoever grabbed Samuelson, why they did it, everything—it’s all old stuff with no meaning, just history. This is just like a hangover or something. Once the Big System is down, we’ll stop having all these emotional attachments to media figures.”
“I don’t know about that,” Zach said. “I read history a lot. After Lincoln was assassinated, a few hundred thousand people dropped everything and went to Washington.”
“I was kind of hoping Daybreak would mean going, you know, like all the way tribal, no government past the next hill.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think it will turn out people still want to build some steam trains and sailing ships, and maybe even a few dirigibles or some telegraphs if they, you know, keep them clean and wrapped in antiseptic cloth all the time . . .”
“You mean if they practice safe machinery?”
“Exactly.”
“I was kind of hoping to maybe get rid of the wheel.”
“Wheels let you raise clean water from depth, and clean water means healthy babies,” Zach said. “You can have my wheel when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”
Jason liked to argue, and he was about to, but he felt that familiar, comforting internal hug, the reminder that you didn’t quibble about Daybreak matters. Take down the Big System and then work out how it was supposed to be after. He felt a surge of warm friendship toward Zach, and it was a while before they talked again.
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. KENNEBEC. SOUTH DAKOTA. 8:56 P.M. CST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Marshalene was loving the drive across South Dakota. She’d pumped up some nice loops in a random feed so that the whole drive had been her favorite high points from her favorite songs, maybe two minutes of music over and over in random scramble. She wouldn’t make it back to B-town tonight, but she’d keep going till she was sleepy, and if she was up till morning, that would be okay; someplace some hotel would take her money to let her sleep for a while.
She’d be over in fucking Iowa before she even had to think about refueling, pissing, and buying more munchies to keep her going till dawn or tired, whichever came first.
Then this unholy screaming, grinding noise scared the piss out of her, and the car tried, all by itself, to run off to the right. She pulled it back onto the road but it wasn’t easy; in her remaining headlight (when had that other one gone out?) she saw a sign for an exit to County Road 19 and Kennebec. Kennebec reminded her of an East Coast name; it seemed like maybe there’d be someone there that got her when she talked.
The passenger-side rear motor had to be what it was, she realized, just like that hippie mechanic dude said. Damn, he’d been good, just not good enough to save what was obviously a dying POS car. Better go into a town and get some help. She took the exit.
Half a mile more, as that grinding noise built up, she was wondering if she’d reach Kennebec; it sounded like the
left
rear motor was going out too. She’d get it towed, first thing in the morning, from the motel parking lot, if she made it to a motel.
She sort of did. The engine had turned itself off but tried to come back on as the battery snapped and banged, and the number on the screen went up and down too fast to read—a bad short, for sure. The starter cranked twice, a funny, screeching noise, and died, but here she was at the driveway of a boarded-up gas station next to the COUNTRYSIDE INN MOTEL VACANCY, so she coasted into it as far as she could, set the brake, and lugged her bag across the parking lot.
The mean old lady behind the counter had the TV turned way up, and clearly didn’t want to talk to Marshalene, because the president or somebody, maybe the other guy, had been shot or was going to talk or something, but she got a room eventually, and when she got into it, it turned out her portable player was dead and all blobbed up with white stuff, so there was no music, and no gift shop to buy another player or any food within walking distance.
Really, some days you could just fucking cry.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 10:15 P.M. EST. OCTOBER 28.
Heather convened the first meeting of Working Group Daybreak about six hours later than she had been asked to head it up; things had simply been too much of a mess for anyone to have spare moments and mindspace during the pursuit and fiery death of Air Force Two, and none of the other working groups had been meeting either. But Arnie Yang had made the trip over and found his way through security, and to her pleasant surprise, Noel Crittenden, who was rarely willing to attend any meeting that might go after five, had dragged himself away from his town house in Silver Spring and made the long trip in as well. “I might as well see some history since I’ve spent my life just knowing things about it,” he explained.
Working Group Daybreak gathered around the conference table, almost everyone with coffee or tea because it seemed certain they’d be here all night.
Edwards and Reynolds sat next to each other, working up a list of questions they wanted to ask; Heather fought down her paranoia and reminded herself that when she’d been in the FBI, she’d been trained to go into everything with a long list of questions, and anyway, the questions could hardly be anything but useful in the circumstances. Lenny Plekhanov and Nancy Telabanian were huddled over the document Arnie had just sent over, checking and rechecking graphs for his presentation, and messaging the analyst teams back at NSA, to make sure that Arnie’s claims were fully supported by their data; no one at NSA would ever completely trust any analysis that didn’t come from NSA, and worse yet, this analysis was just different enough from the math, semiotics, and cryptography they did in-house for them to distrust it. Firmly, Heather reminded herself that everyone preparing for the meeting was helping her, not spying on her.
The man from Deep Black, who had said to just call him Steve, was quietly reading from his phone. Orders? Reports? Enertainment? It might be his Bible; he walked and stood in a military way but he wore a black suit that looked like a Mormon missionary’s or a small-town funeral director’s. Deep Black Steve contrasted with Colonel Green, who, despite her uniform, slumped like a college student in a dull lecture, rubbing her face with tiredness; military people, even very senior ones, often pulled strange schedules, and perhaps she’d been up too long even before the crisis broke.
Arnie hurried in, the portfolio, briefcase, and papers hugged under one arm all on the verge of spilling and his laptop trailing a cord behind it.
Heather fought down a smile; she often suspected that one thing Allie found attractive about Arnie was that she was a natural organizer and Arnie was work for more than one lifetime.
As if to follow the thought, Allie herself came in after him, grabbing up some papers; if it hadn’t been so comical, Heather would have been peeved, since Allie was distinctly not invited, but then Cam came in.
Allie said, “Heather, I’m taking the responsibility, Arnie found something vital, and we think Cam needs to hear about this right away. I’m sorry to rearrange your agenda when it’s been so tough—”
Heather shrugged;
what can anyone do when the universe has its thumb on the MAX CHAOS switch?
“At least something important must be going on. Why don’t we all sit and let Arnie spit it out? If you don’t all know Dr. Arnold Yang, he’s the resident genius at OFTA, and he’s a statistical semiotician, which you could describe as doing what the pattern-recognition charlatans would be pretending to do if they were smart enough to understand it, except Arnie does it with math that would fry Einstein’s brain, and he can not only find things he’s not looking for, his methods can find things no one has ever seen before.”
“That’s a gross oversimplification—”
“Later, Arnie. What’d you find?”
“We’ve got the intersection between Daybreak and the attack on Air Force Two. Clear as a bell—no pun intended, the connection doesn’t run through the Bell cell in Washington. Furthermore, we can be nearly sure it was deliberate right from the start, because on both the Daybreak side and il’Alb side, they did some pretty difficult, complex work to conceal the way they were coordinating with each other. That doesn’t happen by accident, so it’s no coincidence.”
Edwards and Reynolds were leaning forward like leashed dogs smelling blood.
Small wonder, Arnie’s offering them a chance to bust some butts and not feel helpless.
“Here’s the link.” On the room’s screen, he brought up a Saw diagram, the circle-and-arrow graph with contours that let an experienced professional read message traffic within an organization at once. “Heavy relaying made it hard to see at first. Many Daybreak messages worked like chain letters or spam, re-encrypting without decrypting, just proliferating till the message reached the right person with the right keys, and launched its own killer to eliminate all its copies from the net. Wasteful, messy, ultimately it gave our side a lot to work with, but it was fast and easy for Daybreak to use, and all the extra crap it generated meant it took us a long time to weed through all of it to see what was going on.
“Once we disentangled all that, we found eleven sources in il’Alb il-Jihado that were all messaging one Daybreaker in Guerrero Negro, who went by ‘Aaron.’ In turn, he led a very weird AG that didn’t look like any other Daybreak AG—it was all individuals scattered physically within 200 miles of the flight path of Air Force Two over Baja and the Gulf. But they all seemed to believe he had a commune somewhere in the mountains above Guerrero Negro, and they were planning to flee there after carrying out missions.
“We’ve got five of Aaron’s eight AG members identified. The first one, here, is Ysabel Roth—”
“She shot down the airborne radar, or someone did from her apartment,” Reynolds interrupted. “Agents in Yuma got into there just about an hour ago. Can you give us—”
“She’ll be fleeing toward Guerrero Negro, by some indirect route. Probably into Mexico and making things up after she gets there, she’s fluent in Spanish and can pass for Mexican.”
Reynolds nodded, and said, “Excuse me,” then began ticking away on the keys of his laptop.
Arnie said, “Let me run through the rest of the identified and then we’ll hit the non-identified. Peter Rapoch”—he brought up a slide—“released nanoswarm upwind of North Island NAS, so all those planes that were refueling or coming in and out of there are spreading the infection, and some of them may infect their home carriers when they return.”