The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [46]
So, Van personally tasked Fawn with buying 350 used PCs on eBay. As a bridge loan for the CCIAB, Van sold his Range Rover. The Range Rover was in big trouble parked in his Washington neighborhood anyway. It was smarter to sell his truck than to have it carjacked.
Ironically, after selling his Rover, Van had no problem at all requisitioning a posh federal limo. In fact, the black limo driver was a neighbor of his. So Van slithered around Washington in a bombproof stretch limousine with smoked windows, a vehicle often used by the Secretary of State. Then he went home to sleep in a slum.
Fawn was a practiced eBay hand. Fawn bought most of her clothes there, from tiny New Age retailers who made anti-allergenic clothing. Now Fawn bought herself a set of fake eBay IDs for “security reasons.” Soon she was elbow-deep in a web of electronic transactions that Van had no time or energy to oversee.
The 350 used PCs showed up very quickly. Most of their hard disks were crammed with pirate software, viruses, and pornography, but that posed no problems. Van stuck the 350 PC motherboards into hand-welded frames. He installed a completely new operating system that turned them all into small components of a monster system. Grendel was installed in a spare Internet rack in the bowels of the Vault, directly connected to all-powerful servers in the NSA’s Fort Meade.
Days later, Van’s office furniture arrived. Van hadn’t asked for new furniture—he had been working off metal folding chairs—but Fawn took matters into her own hands. She bought a discontinued office suite from a defunct dot-com and boldly had it crated and shipped to the Vault’s secret mail drop in West Virginia.
The CCIAB’s cheerless chunk of bunker blossomed with leopard-dotted Leap Chairs and strange, hexagonal, filmy office sets, featuring spandex light shades and tiltable desks.
Fawn’s flamboyant gear was a major hit within the Vault. Such comforts were unheard-of in federal employment. Envious Defense Department drones would come by just to steal Fawn’s golden paper clips and her teakwood thumbtacks.
The CCIAB won a lasting nickname: “Those Cyberwar People.”
Once again, Van expected someone to lower the boom on them for being too bold, but nobody ever lowered the boom on small boards of advisers that worked for the National Security Council. Except for the President himself, there just wasn’t anybody in the federal government with direct authority to fuss at the CCIAB. Even the President himself would have to create a Special Review Board just to review his special boards, and in times of war, that was out of the question.
The CCIAB was not really a federal agency. Like the National Security Council itself, it was a small, make-do work gang of close colleagues that was trying to steer huge federal bureaucracies into the latest and trendiest policy directions. Like a president, the CCIAB was just a temporary passerby in the federal system. Except for Fawn herself, who had had no job when she begged Jeb for a favor, there was no such thing as a career CCIAB person. Every bureaucrat in the CCIAB was seconded-over from other careers in other bureaucracies. Karl Bowen, their top policy analyst, came from Los Alamos National Lab. Brian Coon, their chief investigator, was from the Office of Criminal Investigations of the IRS. Herbert Howland, the public relations guy, was from the Navy Broadcasting Service. And so forth.
Jeb’s game plan for the CCIAB was to create a realistic policy for National Cyber-Security that the President, Secretary of State, DoD, CIA, NSA, and Joint Chiefs of Staff could all sign off on. The pitifully vulnerable federal computers had to become less sleazy and less easy. Through their own good example, sheer panic, and grim threats, the CCIAB would beat, beat, beat the bureaucrats into line. Whatever could