The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [19]
Mom and Dad were always pretty terrified by this. Van just concentrated on the bagging-and-tagging, hauling Junior’s piece-of-junk hotrod PC out to the white Chevy vans. Van rather liked that part of the assignment. Especially that look on the face of the code kid when he realized that he knew nothing about the people who really owned and ran the Internet.
The hacking scene was pretty brainy as crime scenes went, but it did have down-and-dirty sides. Hacker kids were an ankle-biting nuisance, but the scene also featured ugly grown-ups who stole real money. Van’s counsel had often been sought in such matters. Van knew more than anyone should know about the bad programming habits of Russian bank hackers. Vietnamese computer-chip theft rings were certainly no shrinking violets. A crime family of crazy, shotgun-toting hillbillies in West Virginia had preyed on Mondiale for years, stealing mile after mile of copper telephone cable and selling it for junk.
The thought of their criminal lives and attitudes gave Van a metallic tang in his mouth. Van had never spent much brainpower on ethics, law, or philosophy, but Van could taste evil. Cops knew this about him. Cops regarded Van as a stand-up guy. Cops bought him beer. They respected the difficult things that he told them about network security and computer forensics, and they took the technical steps that he recommended. Van’s software and his advice worked out pretty well for cops. Arrests and convictions followed, and cops liked that a lot.
Since cops were underfoot and on the phone so much, Van had taught himself to speak the language of cops. He kind of liked the way that cops cut the crap. When people became cops, certain delicate, fussy, annoying parts of them got scraped off. Van understood this much more keenly after the events of September 11, 2001. The size and scale of what had happened . . . it had freed him from some complicated doubts and hesitations.
Van was not saying much about these new perceptions. He was trying to figure out his proper place in the world to come.
He stared at his wife as she cradled her infant and her phone with the same overloaded arm, the kid’s noggin nudging her glasses up her cheek. Van was dragging his wife across America, from sea to shining sea, and Dottie could not tell her friends why she had left, or where she was going, or what it was all about.
Because it was secret.
Dottie understood about secret lives, because she had married a Vandeveer. She had met Van’s father, mother, and even his grandfather, and got along with them better than Van did. The women in the Vandeveer family always caught on about the nature of government secrecy, even when their men never said much.
But in the ten years of their marriage, Dottie had never had to deal hands-on with any serious secrecy, not like this. Cops, Dottie could handle: she was always very polite to cops. Dottie never cheated on taxes or broke any traffic laws. For her own peace of mind, Dottie had read the statute books of both Massachusetts and New Jersey.
Spies were more secret than cops. Sometimes the spook world did lean in on Van. Spooks were getting very into cyber-security and infowar. The NSA had always been into computers, and the rest of the spook crowd were finding that world to be more and more sexy. Van had never looked for any spooks voluntarily. But people he knew intimately had lived in that secret world. They had been transformed à la Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Cops changed, but spooks really changed. Spooks could be totally alone, at home, asleep