The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [133]
And yet he had done just that. Odder yet, he had grown to understand the war. He had the scars to prove it. He had become the kind of person who could shift a world’s destiny through acts of organized violence.
He had become a professional. And his profession was always going to be something that didn’t quite exist. The profession of cyberwarrior was always mostly going to be about lying low. The indirect approach, as Liddell-Hart liked to put it. The leak. The putsch within darkness. The patient stalking. The compilation of databases. The cybernetic awareness. The brief and devastating strike. And the silent exfiltration. And the wait.
The Terror was merely an overexcited phase, and like the Bubble, it was going to burst of its own hype. And when it did pop, it would be a rather good thing not to be visibly holding the bag. To be, say, a low-key house husband living in distant Europe. Raising two little kids.
Two days later, as he was watching the bidding for his possessions on eBay, Van’s phone rang.
“Vandeveer.”
The voice on the phone was distant and laggy. “Van? Kind of a blast from the past here. This is Jimmie Matson! You remember me? We used to work together!”
Van paused. He could place the voice before the memory came. Of course. Jimmie Matson at Mondiale. His top lab exec. Why hadn’t Jimmie from Mondiale just said “It’s me, Jimmie from Mondiale”? Of course, Van realized, Jimmie had his reasons not to say such things. Nobody from Mondiale ever said “Mondiale” now.
“Of course I remember you, Jimmie. What’s up?”
“So, I just saw on your Web log that you’re thinking of moving to Denmark! Well, I’m here in Switzerland.”
“How come?”
“I got a post here, a kind of liaison committee . . . The WIPO and the World Telecommunications Union . . . plus some WTO people . . . Well, it’s hard to explain in a few words, Van, but policy here is a major mess.”
“Try me.”
Jimmie sighed into the phone. “Van, I so wish I’d gotten that great post you wanted for me at the CCIAB. But the feds weren’t having any of me, for security reasons I guess . . . Anyway, it is just so impossibly bad up here on the global level . . . You would never believe what is going on behind the scenes here in Geneva . . . The French and Germans really get it about the American hyperpower thing, they are all over our case diplomatically . . . All the delegates here hate each other, Van. They hate each other, they can’t speak the same language, and they are crooked. Plus they have no idea what they are trying to do, technically. That is the worst part. They’ve got nobody to fill this job of technical director.”
“Right.”
“I thought of you for that job, somehow. I mean, it’s an international bureaucracy job, not much for a guy of your caliber, but there’s health insurance and a nice subsidized apartment . . . Beautiful headquarters building right on the lake. Really pretty. You’ve got to hand ’em that.”
“They need someone there to knock heads,” Van said.
“Uh, yeah. Officially, this post calls for an executive with advanced technical skills who has had private-sector international telecom experience and has also served in an advanced capacity in a major government. There’s just one hitch. There is no such guy. And if there was . . . Well, no guy in the world who had done all those things would ever want to come and get involved in this. This is like trench warfare.”
“I just did all that. I’m used to it.”
“I gotta warn you, Van, this scene feels pretty hopeless!”
“Hope is not a feeling, Jimmie. Hope is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what we are doing makes sense, no matter how things turn out.”
Jimmie said nothing for a long moment. Then he spoke in a new voice. “Van, how long have you been reading Vaclav Havel?”
“Oh, President Havel has been a favorite of mine for some time now,” said Van.
“Could