The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [65]
So, like a lot of other policy players in the Bush administration, Jeb had taken to speaking in Rumsfeldese. In return for allowing Van to meddle with the KH-13 satellite, Jeb announced that it was time for Grendel, Van’s “project launch,” to be “spun out and delegated to a responsible agency that can add some structure.” Van was not allowed to whine or moan to Jeb about this harsh decision, either. Instead, Van was told to “avoid overcontrolling” and to “ease that personality bottleneck.”
It was Hickok who explained to Van what this speech meant in English. “Your boss is taking away your best toy and he’s selling it out to the highest bidder, fella. Your Grendel gizmo is bait for the brass hats now, pure and simple. Jeb wants to see those big boys fighting a bidding war to take that thing over, see? That’ll improve his bargaining position with them.”
“But I built it,” Van protested. “Plus, I paid for it all with my own checks.”
“So what? You can’t grow it any bigger. You don’t have the money or staff around here. So don’t you feel bad about that! If some major outfit takes all that hard work on for y’all, hey, that’s a big victory!” Hickok beamed on him. The loss of Grendel meant that Van had time to work on Hickok’s problem.
So, Van won official permission to tinker with satellites. Unofficially, this permission meant very little, because Van was already neck-deep inside the blue folder. Michael Hickok, the man who had leaked it to him, had instantly become Van’s best war buddy.
The two of them were always close, because Hickok was physically chained to the KH-13’s secret documents. Whenever Van examined the satellite’s problems, Hickok had to be present with him in the room. Van had never gotten over the burning tingle of curiosity, the technical thrill he first felt as he leafed through the weird, forbidden schematics of the world’s most advanced flying spy machine.
At first, as Van obsessed over the KH-13’s malfunction reports, Hickok just idled around the CCIAB’s concrete den inside the Vault. He flirted with Fawn, made cell-phone calls to a series of loose women, and paged through computer security brochures.
But Michael Hickok was a man of action. It wasn’t in him to waste time. He watched Van’s office routines, then he made himself useful.
Van’s least favorite job was to demo security gadgets for the Vault’s many cyberwar groupies. There were packs of gizmos arriving for Van every day. Dongles and decryptors. Peel-and-stick RFID labels. Teflon and Kevlar security cables. Barcodes and asset tags. Ridiculous homemade EMP blasters right out of the aluminum-foil hat set. Teensy-tiny locks on chipsets sculpted right into the microscopic silicon with ultra-high-tech MEMS techniques . . . The CCIAB had become a clearinghouse for American infowar toys.
Van spent a lot of valuable overtime reviewing and clearing peculiar gizmos for the Special Forces. The Delta Force, the Navy SEALS . . . they got to carry any kind of gadget they pleased, but they were too small to support their own R&D labs. They had to depend on the kindness of strangers.
Hickok quickly got the hang of Van’s spiel to Vault visitors. It was basically the same old Frequently Asked Security Questions, over and over again. Van hated this mind-dulling routine. When ignorant people failed to read the manual and asked him stupid questions, this brought out Van’s tough, potted-cactus side.
After watching Van stammer, bark, and hand-saw his way through these briefings, Hickok asserted himself and just took them over. Hickok did very well at the work. Hickok had a knack for boiling down complex technical issues to a military briefing level that career bureaucrats could understand.
With his baritone voice, his soldierly good looks, and two