The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [57]
Van offered Elvis the Leap Chair and sat on the ripply edge of his plastic computer desk. The Vault cells were so small that it was like meeting a guy inside a photography booth. “I’m Dr. Vandeveer,” Van offered. “What can we do you for?”
Elvis crushed Van’s hand with a Right Stuff handshake. “I’m Michael Hickok.”
Van’s crushed hand flew straight to his beard. He stroked it thoughtfully. Hickok didn’t seem to notice his shock. After a moment, Van had steadied himself. So here he was at last then, Michael Hickok, that hustler, that ruthless mercenary, showing up at the office like a bad penny. Jeez, no wonder Hickok never took that briefcase off—he was wandering around just like that lost atomic lunatic in Repo Man. A cynical operator with a thirteen-billion-dollar political liability that he was trying to dump on the first available sucker. And he’d already successfully put the charm on Van’s naive young secretary. If Tony Carew hadn’t bent the rules to warn him . . .
“Nice to meet you,” Van lied.
“Doc, I’m told you’ve been cleared Executive Gamma,” said Hickok.
“That’s true. We do some satellite work here at the CCIAB. Communications software and protocols.”
“I can’t understand that sort of thing myself,” drawled Hickok. “But my employers are real, real anxious to have some experts doctor their sick bird.”
“I see.” Van was fully prepared to lower the boom on the guy. Close up and in person, though, Hickok gave off the spooky vibe of a Delta Force karate master. It looked like he could break every object in the room with his bare feet.
Why rush anything? Van thought. Surely it would be much cagier to study Hickok’s technique. Politely lure him in with a pretense of innocent cooperation. “So tell me about it.”
Hickok reached into his pocket and removed a lethal-looking folding knife with a dangling set of keys. “I’ll have to open this secure briefcase now.”
Van glanced up. “Scram, Fawn.”
Fawn’s eager face fell. Fawn was not cleared Executive Gamma. “But . . .”
“Shut the door, and shut the outer door. Stand in the hall. If you see anybody strange, let me know right away.”
“Yes, sir,” said Fawn, who never called him “sir.” She left.
Hickok opened the briefcase with a small gray key. The case held a set of common-looking Pentagon-style folders, the sort used for weapons procurement programs. Van had seen more than his share of these Pentagon folders lately. Through fifty years of military bureaucratic ritual, the Pentagon had created its own unique paperwork style, with everything initialized through chains of superior officers, and documented in quintuplicate.
Van recognized the folders he was confronting as a classic “Pearl Harbor file.” Whenever a big-ticket project went sour, paperwork escalated as the guilty parties tried to cover their asses from the investigation that they knew was coming. The folders began to bulge, dent, and rip. There was wear and tear as the evidence got tossed from hand to hand like a hot potato.
There was no way Van was going to waste his life working his way through this huge stack of self-serving gibberish. It was time to move this farce right along. “I see we have a big opportunity-cost here.”
“That’s the truth,” said Hickok, “but my employers are willing to be more than generous with resources. That’s a ten-billion-dollar project you’re lookin’ at there.”
Van knew for a fact that the KH-13 was a thirteen-billion-dollar boondoggle that had been budgeted for eight. Van waved his hand around the junk-towering walls of his tiny office. It was densely crowded with hopeful toys of the infowar trade: solar-powered outdoor spycams, shirt-pocket-sized anthrax sniffers, biometric access gizmos that stared into eyeballs and sucked users’ thumbs. Ninety percent of them were useless, but someone responsible had to look at them and throw