The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [36]
The Colonel leaned in toward the mouthpiece. “I don’t care how many toy airplanes he has, or what they can see. We’re in the dark, next to bandits on foot, moving under cover. They will fire rockets on us from far up the slope, above the cave. Oh, and tell him it’s a lovely gun.”
Kickoff listened to the reply and made an extensive prepared speech.
“Alexei, he says to thank you for the compliment. He also says he’s coming home to see me.” She was excited.
“And he’s taking our satellite phone away, my dear?”
“Of course he’s taking our phone. But he’s not taking that gun, Alexei. He’s not supposed to carry it inside America. He says that you should keep it. He says he knows a good soldier can use a good gun. He wants you to know that he appreciates you.”
“He’s a generous man with a gift, your big friend here.” Kickoff was giving a soldier a fine weapon, instead of some mere sordid bribe of dollars. That was very tactful of the American. The Colonel was touched. A handsome gift like this was a clear hint that the two of them would meet again in the future. That seemed probable enough. There certainly wasn’t likely to be any shortage of oil thieves.
“Trust me, Alexei, he didn’t pay for that gun himself.”
“Oh, no. Of course Kickoff didn’t pay for it.” Yet others would. A fancy rifle like this was worth a great deal of money. Especially in the right set of wrong hands. The Colonel winced a little at that thought. Young Russian troopers, bewildered, conscripted, doomed, their flesh flying apart under those silent ferocious impacts . . . But only one side in Chechnya was awash in cash. That was not his own side. His side was merely a national army, not a global conspiracy. His side was always broke.
The thought didn’t bear contemplation. And yet, and yet, Natalya. Yes, if fate demanded it, he could do a thing like that for Natalya’s sake. Because love conquered all.
CHAPTER
FIVE
WASHINGTON, D.C., DECEMBER 2001
Tall yellow cranes were digging black wreckage from the Pentagon. American flags the size of basketball courts covered the walls of federal offices, Old Glory the Battle Flag as a kind of angry wallpaper. Truck bomb barriers, strangely disguised as concrete flower pots, bloomed right, left, and center. The streets around the White House had become empty asphalt malls, where jittery tourists lurked in ones and twos.
The newly formed Coordination of Critical Information Assurance Board met in the Old Executive Building, under the sponsorship of the Vice President. The badly overcrowded conference room had leather club chairs, steel coffee urns, lots of dented mahogany, and an ancient oil painting of an elder statesman named John C. Calhoun. Mr. Calhoun didn’t look happy. Neither did the crowd.
If Van didn’t know all the faces, he knew the institutions. Every major federal bureaucracy had some kind of stake in computer security work. The Justice Department with the FBI, the Treasury with their Secret Service. The Department of Defense had a Defense Information Systems Agency. The Air Force was high-flying and enthusiastic, while the Navy worked to keep up steam. The Commerce Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NASA was there. The Computer Emergency Response Team, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. Even one lonely computer whiz from the Railroad Retirement Board.
The National Security Council, Van’s new employer, had sent out the invitations. This was their first big dance. If this shindig worked out, then a lot of things might work out. If this didn’t work, then Van had just blown his career for a swift bureaucratic fiasco.
With a thirty-year career in computer crimebusting, Jeb was a living dinosaur of computer security. Jeb had trained a lot of the people in this conference room, and most of them owed him favors. Van had a gold-star reputation as a coder, but was a personal stranger to most of these people. Most of them were strangers to one another.
This was the cyber-version of a larger story happening all over the federal