The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [17]
It was the worst emergency of Van’s career. It wasn’t just a question of his company taking it on the chin. Feds wanted his advice, by e-mail, fax, and phone. Lots of feds wanted him. Law enforcement, military, infrastructure protection. Feds were calling him from agencies he had never heard of, and Van had heard of plenty. Van’s future was swinging like a broken window in those smoking, ash-laden winds.
Van was not panicking. He felt grim confidence that he could manage. Cops were dead, firemen were dead, but Van was not dead and he was in no mood to play dead, either. He understood that his life had been profoundly changed, and that from now on his services would be needed in new ways. Everything would be different, harder, uglier, tougher, and more dangerous. He just needed a few good, solid ideas about that situation, that was all. He needed some genuine wisdom, from someone that he trusted. He needed a point of view that was solid and simple, that would settle him down.
So, for very powerful, very personal reasons, Van had to travel right away from Merwinster, New Jersey, to Burbank, California.
Dottie understood this need of his. She never asked for many words from him. As foul black clouds spread across the television screen, Dottie went into a trance of efficiency. Her bright eyes went keen and hard behind her little round glasses. She packed up the baby, and herself. She even managed to find Helga the au pair.
Van packed three PCs, a laptop, a printer, three toolboxes, eight car batteries, five cell phones, and a satellite dish. Van’s car was a sixty-thousand-dollar truck with fifty-eight cubic feet of cargo space. This was the Range Rover’s finest hour. He also removed the rearmost seats and packed the futon from his office, for the sake of catnaps. No matter what Van was going to be doing, he was sure he would be doing it around the clock.
Van wasn’t keen on lugging Helga all the way to California. Helga was nineteen years old, and pretty, and a foreigner. For Helga, the United States was one big Disney World where sweet older men showered her with gifts. Real terrorism made Helga really terrified. Helga sobbed miserably as she climbed aboard the Range Rover. She couldn’t stop weeping.
Van was an excellent driver. Dottie was a careful, methodical driver. Helga was a lousy teenage driver who lacked even an international driver’s license. But Van made Helga drive the Rover anyway. The work made her stop sniffling.
As the miles rolled beneath the Range Rover’s Michelins, Dottie comforted baby Ted and tried to doze, saving up for her time at the wheel. Dottie wasn’t allowed much sleep. Time and again her Motorola tri-band sprang to shrill, bleeping life. Dottie’s astrophysicists in Boston regarded Dottie as their den mom. Dottie was the only one in the lab who knew where they kept the whiteboard markers and the Coffee-mate.
Van had never overheard Dottie dealing at such intimate length with her colleagues. During their married life, she had usually spared him this ordeal. Van was guiltily aware that he had never been a good faculty spouse for Dottie. They had a two-career marriage where neither party self-sacrificed. They were hugely respectful of each other’s gifts and ambitions, so whenever somebody’s personal sacrifice became absolutely necessary, they would hire somebody else to do it, and pay them a salary.
On I-470 near Columbus, Ohio, Van’s third phone rang. Of the five he had packed, the batteries had already died in two.
“Vandeveer.”
“Van, that was not a hack attack.” This was a familiar voice for Van. A growl, really. Orson Welles with a Texas accent. A man who weighed three hundred pounds and always talked straight from the gut.
Van knew Jeb’s voice well, but there was a new quality in it since those towers had gone down.
“How do you know that?” Van said, scowling as he sat cross-legged on his folded futon. “Did they check the avionics boxes?”
“Al Qaeda can’t hack