Distraction - Bruce Sterling [136]
At least, that had always been the implicit understanding. But understandings could change. And after his night’s experience, he found himself inhabiting a different world.
“Unless I miss my guess,” Oscar said, “our kidnappers had a rendezvous at the Sabine River last night. They were planning to smuggle us across the state line, to hand us over to some crowd of Huey’s militia. But they were jumped in the dark, by some kind of night-flying U.S. tiger team. Airborne armed commandos of some kind, who surprised Huey’s people on the ground last night, and absolutely shot them to pieces.”
“Why on earth would they do such a thing?” Greta said, shocked. “They should have used nonlethal force and arrested them.”
“Airborne commandos aren’t policemen. They’re genuine special-forces fanatics, who still use real guns! And when they spotted that French spy submarine in the water, they must have lost their tempers. I mean, imagine their reaction. If you’re a heavily armed U.S. black-helicopter ace, and you see a secret submarine sneaking up an American river … well, once you’ve pulled the trigger, you can’t strafe a thing like that just once.”
Greta’s brows knitted. “Did you really see a submarine, Oscar?”
“Oh yes. I can’t swear that it was French, but it sure wasn’t one of ours. Americans don’t build cute, efficient little submarines. We prefer our submarines bigger than a city block. Besides, it all makes sense that way. The French have an aircraft carrier offshore. They’ve got drones flying over the bayous. The French invented the frogman-spy tradition.… So of course it was a cute little French sub. Poor bastards.”
“You know,” Kevin said thoughtfully, “normally, I’m very down on law-and-order issues, but I think I like this Two Feathers guy. The deal is—all you have to do is call him! They wake him up at four AM, and your problem is solved before dawn! This new President is a take-charge guy! The old guy would never have pulled a stunt like that. This is a real change of pace for America, isn’t it? It’s executive authority in action, that’s what it is! It’s like—he’s the Chief Executive, so he just executes ’em!”
“I don’t think that a shooting war between state and federal spooks is what the President had in mind for his first day in office,” Oscar said. “That’s not a healthy development for American democracy.”
“Oh, get over it!” Kevin scoffed. “Kidnapping is terrorism! You can’t take a soft line with terrorists—there’s no end to that crap! The bastards got exactly what was coming to them! And that’s just what we need inside the Collaboratory, too. We need an iron hand with these scumbags.…” Kevin scowled mightily, gripping the peeling wheel of the car in uncontrollable excitement. “Man, it chaps my ass to think of those crooked Tinkertoy coppers in there, getting ready to bust up those eggheads. And here I am—me, Kevin Hamilton, thirty-two years old—a fugitive again, running scared. If I only had, like, twenty heavy-duty Irish Southies with some pool cues and table legs. There’s only twelve lousy cops in that whole laboratory. They haven’t been doing anything for ten years, except tapping phone lines and taking payoffs. We could beat those sons of bitches into bad health.”
“This is a new you we’re hearing from, Kevin,” Oscar observed.
“Man, I never knew that I could just talk to the President! Y’know, I’m a prole, and a hacker, and a phone phreak. I admit all that. But when you get to be my age, you just get sick of outsmarting them all the time! You get tired of having to dodge ’em, that’s all. How come I have to sneak around in the cracks in the floorboards? I tell you, Dr. Penninger—you let me run your security, you’d see some changes made.”
“Are you telling me that you want to be the lab’s security chief, Mr. Hamilton?”
“No, of course I’m not, but …” Kevin paused in surprise. “Well, yeah! Yeah, sure!