The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [102]
Van closed his eyes. He opened them. Unfortunately, Fawn was still sitting there.
“I mean, like, when we started whistle-blowing at Enron—that was all us women in the Enron office who were doing that, you know. We women at Enron were the only ones who were paying attention to the details.”
Van stared at her.
“Boy, those big cowboys in Houston sure thought they were hell on wheels. ‘Fast Andy’ Fastow, Ken Lay . . . They kept dividing the company into these neat little teams, you know, just ten percent of the normal accountants . . . Really quick responses, and all these quiet, secret offshore projects that no one ever talked about . . . I’m so lucky that Jeb found me a federal job after all that. I mean, life after working for Enron . . . I don’t even tell people that I once worked for Enron. The weirdest part is, that was like a totally plum job, too. I mean, Enron recruited the top of the top of the class. The best of the best. I was Enron fresh out of college.”
Van sucked cold air through the gap in his broken teeth.
“But thanks to you, I can make a brand-new career. In federal security, I can go just as far as my talent can take me. There’s no glass ceiling there! I mean, Janet Reno was Attorney General!”
Resignedly, Van adjusted Fawn’s bedside bouquet.
“Can I tell you one more thing, Van? You look so nice without that beard. You look so normal. I mean, that side of your face that isn’t swollen. I like your hair that way, too. It’s kind of like Sonny Bono before he became a congressman.” Fawn offered him her nicest smile. Then she sneaked a look at her watch.
Van showed her his computer screen.
WHAT ABOUT THE HAVEL BOOK, THOUGH
“You can keep that.”
Van typed faster. I MEAN< WHAT’S IT ABOUT< FAWN< WHY ME?
“You read it, and see if you can find that out for yourself,” she said.
ERLETTE HOUSE, VIRGINIA, MARCH 2002
Erlette House was an eighteenth-century Virginia estate. It had once been a rival of Mount Vernon or Monticello. It had become a country retreat for the power elite in Washington.
Once upon some mythical time, most senators and congressmen had been land-owning squires. They felt most at their ease in the simple, warm hospitality of some big rural farm. In Erlette House, this gentlemanly fiction was still kept up. The hay fields were still raked with teams of horses, even though Erlette House had helicopter pads, a landing strip, and a computer center. Erlette House was surrounded by modern Virginia suburbs, with strip malls and glass office towers. But Erlette House was still a real country estate, sort of. It had livestock, roses, and swans.
Van, Dottie, and Ted had been assigned their own rooms in the Erlette House “Lake Cottage.” This “cottage,” actually a small mansion, featured stone hearths, Federal-style chairs of antique oak, primitive American art, and a four-poster bed with a lovely handmade quilt. The Lake Cottage brimmed over with old-school East Coast Establishment virtue. Every object in its rooms sat there in timeless restraint, polished by good taste, power, and heaps of old money. Except, of course, for Van’s and Dottie’s laptops, which were like two Martian tripods out of H. G. Wells.
Dottie collapsed on the bed. The white feather mattress dented around her like a stick-toasted marshmallow. Dottie was very prone to airsickness. Her long flight to Erlette House on Tony’s jouncing private jet had badly upset her stomach. She was pale and greenish.
Van popped the lid from a cold curved bottle with an attachment of his Swiss Army cyberknife. “You want a Dramamine, sweetie?”
“I’m trying to keep one down,” Dottie said in a small, pinched voice.
Van put Dottie’s Perrier bottle on the bedside table. The bedside table was ancient, wobbly, and dented. The table was very old. It was some kind of eighteenth-century American furniture invention that had never quite caught on. It looked