The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [113]
The jet touched down. It jounced violently and became airborne again. Luggage compartments flapped open and there was a distant crashing from the galley. Then the wheels hit with a screech.
The end of the runway rushed upon them. Straps bit into Van’s chest and gut.
The jet stopped. The engines died. Hot metal cooled and ticked.
“Yahoo,” Tony murmured. “Yahoo-dot-com.”
Floodlights flicked over the runway. Van saw to his horror that an enthusiastic crowd was surging toward the plane. Tony laughed aloud. “Van, look at ’em! You are a movie star!”
“I’ll have to give them some kind of speech,” Van realized.
“Van, a great tech demo can save any situation. And you just gave them one. This is a victory speech. I’ll jot you down a couple talking points.”
Van was awake inside the Lake Cottage. He felt too elevated to sleep.
Dottie was sleeping in the featherbed. A tendril of brown hair was glued to her forehead with sweat. The woman should never take Dramamine and also drink white wine, thought Van kindly. It really made her manic.
So funny that Tony Carew somehow imagined that his actress girlfriend was his wild angel. That woman was playing a phony role, that was obvious. While Dottie, who had been married to him for ten years, had found her inner tigress.
Van had never imagined Dottie for a gossip, but it seemed that her work in public relations had turned her head around. In just one evening mingling with the Joint Summit crowd, Dottie had wormed out a host of inside stories that Van had never heard or even dreamed of. This stuff was all cocktail blather, obviously, but it was about himself.
People from outside the CCIAB had notions about him that were wildly divorced from reality. They knew that he lived in a slum, but they thought he had chosen to live there because he liked to beat up crooks. People thought he had a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. They knew for a fact that he carried a high-tech gun. He was supposed to be hacking into foreign computers every week. He was recruiting Special Forces people, breaking into terrorist facilities and installing Trojan Horses and fatal viruses. Also, supposedly, he was having an affair with Fawn.
This bizarre tittle-tattle might have upset Van, except that Jeb was catching it even worse. Jeb had a whole set of legends attached to him, like a shark followed by remora fish. Jeb had heart arrhythmias. He had advanced diabetes. He’d had a fistfight with Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice had had to break it up (this was the best story, actually). Jeb got anxious phone calls three times a day from Larry Ellison. Jeb had a Republican Party slush fund. Jeb had hired Cuban exiles to wiretap the French Embassy. Jeb was addicted to Halcion pills. Jeb was secretly gay.
He, Derek R. Vandeveer, had become the toughest, scariest cyberwarrior in Washington. It made Van wonder if he had ever understood anything about any other human being in his life. Was he delusional? Maybe, when it came to computers, everyone in the world was delusional.
On a number of occasions, Van had met the President of the United States. This poor guy even had his own military acronym: POTUS. In real life, Van had met an affable Texan baseball fan in his fifties who liked nothing better than eating pretzels and watching a few innings on the ol’ boob tube. He had twin teenage daughters who gave him a lot of grief. This was the President of the United States. Somehow this was the very same guy as the remorseless military war chief who was relentlessly crushing the world’s most feared and respected mountain bandits.
And now he had even met James Cobb. Van opened his laptop bag and retrieved Cobb’s business card. For Van, this had been the true highlight of the Virginia Summit. It had moved him deeply that a man he had once idolized had recognized him as a colleague.
Up popped Cobb’s Web site. It wasn’t a site at all, just a series