Distraction - Bruce Sterling [7]
The guard stopped them. The kid’s military-police uniform was oddly rumpled—apparently dug from the bottom of a mildewed duffel bag. The kid looked them over: a well-dressed politico accompanied by his krewe bodyguard. Certainly nothing unusual there. The young soldier scanned them with a detector wand, failing to notice Oscar’s all-plastic spraygun, and then addressed himself to Oscar. “ID, sir?”
Oscar passed over a gleaming dossier chip embossed with a federal Senate seal.
Four minutes later, they were ushered inside the building. There were two dozen armed men and women inside the hospitality suite. The intruders had shoved the furniture against the walls, and staked out the doors and windows. Muffled thuds, scrapes, and crunches emanated from the ceiling, as if the attic were infested with giant, armed raccoons.
The original staffers from the Louisiana tourist office were still inside the building. The hospitality krewe were well-dressed middle-aged Southern ladies, with done hair and ribbons, and nice skirts and flats. The ladies had not been arrested or formally detained, but they had been crowded together into a dismal corner of their foil-darkened office, and they looked understandably distressed.
The commanding Air Force officer was dead drunk. Oscar and Fontenot were greeted by the public relations officer. The PR man was also plastered.
The central office was crammed with portable military command-post gear, an overjammed closet full of stencils, khaki, and flickering screens. The place reeked of spilled whiskey; the commanding officer, still in full dress uniform including his spit-polished shoes, was sprawled on a khaki cot. His visored and braided hat half concealed his face.
The PR officer, a chunky, uniformed veteran with graying hair and seamed cheeks, was busy at a set of consoles. The pegboard counters trailed fat tangles of military fiber-optic cable.
“How may I help you gentlemen?” the PR officer said.
“I need to move a bus through,” said Oscar. “A campaign bus.”
The officer blinked, his eyelids rising at two different instants. His voice was steady, but he was very drunk. “Can’t you fellas just buy a little something from our nice little Air Force bake sale?”
“I’d like to oblige you there, but under the circumstances, it would look …” Oscar mulled it over. “Insensitive.”
The PR officer lightly tapped Oscar’s gleaming dossier card on the edge of his console bench. “Well, maybe you should think that over, mister. It’s a long way back to Boston.”
Fontenot spoke up. Fontenot was good-copping it, being very sane and reasonable. “If you just suspended your operations for half an hour or so, the traffic backlog would clear right up. Our vehicle would slip right through.”
“I suppose that’s an option,” the officer said. One of his screens stopped churning, and uttered a little triumphant burst of martial brass. The PR man examined the results. “Whoa.… You’re the son of Logan Valparaiso!”
Oscar nodded, restraining a sigh. A good netsearch program was guaranteed to puncture your privacy, but you could never predict its angle of attack beforehand.
“I knew your dad!” the PR officer declared. “I interviewed him when he starred in the remake of El Mariachi.”
“You don’t say.” The computer had spewed up a bit of common ground for them. It was a cheap stunt, a party trick, but like a lot of psychological operations techniques, it worked pretty well. The three of them were no longer strangers.
“How is your ol’ dad these days?”
“Unfortunately, Logan Valparaiso died back in ‘42. A heart attack.”
“That’s a shame.” The officer snapped his pudgy fingers in regret. “He sure made some great action films.”
“Dad took a lower profile in his later life,” Oscar said. “He went into real estate.” They were both lying. The films, though hugely popular,