Distraction - Bruce Sterling [135]
“Well, I’m denying it now!” Greta said, wrenching herself up with her cuffed hands. “I’ll go back there and take them all on face-to-face.”
“Softly, softly,” Oscar said. “When the timing’s right.”
“So, there I was, in a bad corner,” Kevin said. “I was thinking—who has the gall and the muscle to kidnap two famous people like that? And then spread all this killer disinformation about them.…”
“Huey,” Oscar said.
“Who else? So now, it’s little me versus Green Huey, right? And who’s gonna help me against Huey? The lab’s cops? They’re all Huey’s people from way back. Buna city cops? Forget it, they’re way too dumb. Texas Rangers maybe? The Rangers are very scary people, but they wouldn’t believe me, I’m not Texan. So then I thought of Senator Bambakias—he’s an okay guy, I guess, and at least he’s a real sworn-in Senator now, but he’s somewhat insane at the moment. So, I’m ready to cash in my chips and head for sunny Mexico. But then, just before I go, I think—what the hell, what have I got to lose? I’ll call the President.”
“The President of the United States?” Greta said.
“Yeah, him. So that’s what I did.”
Oscar considered this fact. “When was this decision made?”
“I called the White House this morning at four AM.”
Oscar nodded. “Hmmm. I see.”
“Don’t tell me that you actually talked to the President,” Greta said.
“Of course I didn’t talk to the President! The President’s not awake at four AM! I can tell you who’s up at four AM, at the White House national security desk. It’s this brand-new, young, military aide from Colorado. He’s a fresh new transition-team guy. It’s his very first day on the job. He’s working the graveyard shift. He’s kinda twitchy. Nothing important has ever happened to him before. He’s not real streetwise. And he’s not that hard a guy to reach, either—especially if you call him on twenty or thirty phones, all at once.”
“And what did you tell the President’s new national security aide?” Oscar prompted gently.
Kevin examined his navigation console and took a left turn into the deeper woods. “Well, I told him that the Governor of Louisiana had just kidnapped the Director of a federal laboratory. I kinda had to spice up my story to hold his interest—Huey’s gang was holding her hostage, there were French secret agents involved, you know, that sort of thing. I chucked in some juicy details. Luckily, this guy was very up to speed on the Louisiana air base problem. Real aware of the Louisiana military radar hole, and all that. See, this guy’s a lieutenant colonel, and he happens to come from Colorado Springs, where they have this very massive Air Force Academy. Seems there is, like, extremely irritated Air Force sentiment in Colorado. They hate Huey’s guts for making the Air Force look like weak sisters.”
“So this colonel believed your story?” Oscar said.
“Hell, I dunno. But he told me he was gonna check his satellite surveillance records, and if they backed up my story, he was gonna wake up the President.”
“Amazing,” Greta said, impressed despite herself. “They’d have never woken up the old guy for a thing like that.”
Oscar said nothing. He was trying to imagine the likely consequences if the President’s national security team pressed their panic buttons at four AM, on the very first day on the job. What weird entities might leap from the crannies of the American military-entertainment complex? There were so many possibilities: America’s aging imperial repertoire of Delta forces, SWATs, SEALs, high-orbital, antiterrorist, rapid-deployment, pep-pill-gobbling, macho super-goons.… Not that these strange people would ever be used, in modern political reality. The military killer elite were creatures of a long-vanished